Ben Gilbert: prediction

Transcript context

…Exactly. Same dynamic. Whereas in the previous categories of apps that we talked about, Google had the advantage of uniquely being able to do it as Google in a way that startups couldn’t. Here, it’s a little bit the opposite. YouTube as a small startup has the advantage of, oh, copyright, rules, laws. I don’t know. We’re just a platform. We’re just a startup. Anybody upload anything. Google, by this point in time is a public company. No way they could behave like this. Well, it’s funny. They could but they wouldn’t. They actually could do it and stay in business. Whereas YouTube can say, eh, whatever, but then they’re going to go out of business because they’re going to get sued out of business. It’s this really interesting catch-22 of this is the way to start and get all the users because this is the best user experience. At the same time, it will not work as a resource-constrained small company. Once it is started, it needs to be part of Google. Obviously we’re going to get to that. But in the beginning, though, oh my gosh. the embeds were a beautiful distribution growth mechanic for YouTube, but people were just uploading copyrighted video that people could watch for free. It’s almost like Gmail. It is so unbelievably compelling to a consumer. When your friend tells you about YouTube or just sends you a link or you see an embed page of, whoa, I can go watch Lazy Sunday from Lonely Island and Saturday Night Live in my web browser anytime I want for free with no commercials? Yes, I want that. In fact, when users started uploading Lazy Sunday, the Lonely Islands skit from Saturday Night Live to YouTube—this is in that brief phase where YouTube was an ascendant startup and not yet part of Google—that one skit increased YouTube traffic by 83%. Unbelievable.…

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