These days a feature set isn't worth much

LeeAnn Prescott posts some really interesting Hitwise statistics relevant to the rumoured Google YouTube deal. She ends the post concluding that "Google, with its great engineering team, could eventually build all the features of YouTube and make it even better for far less money than it would take to buy it, if indeed the going price is over $1 billion".

Sure. If you don't know by now that it costs less than a billion dollars to create a site better than YouTube, you're  a lost soul. But with hundreds of video sites out there, many with more interesting features than either YouTube or Google - mostly built for less than a million dollars, let alone a billion - it's not really about the feature set any more, is it? This mislocates the issue, as though Google's engineering team has just been running slowly during the first 300m and might come through on the home straight. The race is  over. Google lost. Google failed to get its strategic priorities right and trashed several billion dollars of shareholder value in the process.

We've been tracking the popularity of YouTube and Google videos for the last few weeks from a different standpoint, that of blog linkage. Google's barely a player, despite recent feature upgrades and despite the fact that it owns one of the most popular blogging platforms on the planet. The only player that runs YouTube close is MySpace, and Google had their chance there and, perhaps understandably, passed.

Comments

[Vidizer]

Yep, Google are definitely paying for "testing the water" with their Google Video for an year. They look like the clumsy kid on the street now.