YouTube's perceived success

How successful is YouTube really? It's website generates 72 million pageviews per MONTH, and a 100 million videos are streamed every DAY. But where? And if it is not on www.youtube.com, how will they make money? Not this way probably... And if it's primarily (90%+?) on other websites, then how sustainable is their apparant success compared to services that are similar or even better? Everybody is writing about the success of YouTube while refering to YouTube as a destination website, but it isn't. At least not by the numbers you read everywhere....

The Google Base promise

December last year I wrote about Google Base "as a potential king of vertical search". Yesterday Google announced the Google Base API, a very important step in that direction. The API allows for entering, editing and retrieval of data on a large scale. Data essentially consisting of advertisements in several categories. What is so important about this is that all this content (which for the most part was already available on the web) is now structured so that it can easily be (re)used. By Google, but also by others that write applications that use data stored in Google Base. Structuring (now unstructured) data will be a very important element in the 'search engine war' between companies like Google, Yahoo en Microsoft. SimplyHired and Edgeio are other examples of this trend, they focus on niches. It would not surprise me however if an inportant part of their data will come from services like Google Base in the near future. And they will submit their own listings to Google Base in order to generate search engine leads.

A location independent career

I'm sure there will be more people dreaming of doing things differently after reading this article ;-)

"Still, many call the spread of high-speed Internet the most radical redefinition of the workplace since the Industrial Revolution. "It's a restructuring of rural places," says Bill Gillis, director of the Center to Bridge the Digital Divide at Washington State University. "Accomplished professionals are moving into rural areas, and young, educated people are not having to move away. There's a stronger tax base, and this feeds into schools and public services. "Ideally in a global world, people have choices about where they want to live and work — whether that would be Queen Anne Hill or a wheat field or the Methow. Broadband enables the opportunity. It doesn't necessarily guarantee the result."