Quote from makloda:
Marketshare of what? What market. A market IMO is a system that connects buyers and sellers. How does showing people ad free videos at no cost represent a market? Or running a free social networking site?
That's not a market IMO, that's a waste of money trying to get the ever important eyeballs.
Everyone thought Hotmail, Altavista, Geocities, ICQ, DIVX etc. had nothing to fear because they were thought to be de-facto standards. Standards change on the Internet in a heartbeat.
Youtube could be history in 2 years. So far, I have not heard about a single viable business model for them. How on earth are they going to monetize their traffic WITHOUT seeing visitors leave in droves because either they do not want to pay or they don't like the ads? They can just goto Revver, Metacafe etc. in the blink of an eye and get exactly 1:1 the same thing.
I have been wrong about Google before because they far exceeded the amount of profits I ever thought possible to be made by a search engine. But again, that doesn't mean we shouldn't be critical of any of their moves and all this Web 2.0 mumbo jumbo. There are very very few companies on the Web that make solid money (Billions are made in areas most underestimate because they're not on the radar screen of public companies: casino, sportbetting, porn, adult dating/matchmaking) versus a truckload of hollow Web2.0 startup outfits that will never make a single dollar as they just hope to be bought out for a couple hundred million by some public company.