Skip to main content

What other start-ups can learn from YouTube

Image
By
Deepak Thomas and Vineet Buch have published a case study on YouTube.
YouTube essentially took a problem with a few pre-existing, albeit clumsy solutions, added some engineering ingenuity and lots of creativity to come up with the best working solution. Content suppliers, i.e. those uploading videos could now upload video effortlessly. They could tag uploaded videos with keywords. On the consumption side, by adopting a Macromedia Flash-based video player embedded on a web-page, which played the video almost instantaneously, YouTube eliminated the need for downloads and local media players. Users could now search for videos by keywords, share them by mailing links to the videos, and also rate and comment on these videos. Consequently, popular videos bubbled up to the top in an organic fashion. Notice how, besides the player, other features were essentially attributes of sites sharing pictures, Flicker for example. YouTube was able to adopt what worked in the world of picture-sharing to the world of video-sharing.

...Distributing popular and hard-to-find video clips was clearly a success factor. Clips of the popular, long-running television show, Saturday Night Live was a particularly significant example. A free-form platform that allowed users to upload content had to contend with copyright violations. While this is one of the oft-repeated complaints about YouTube, it should be remembered that the founders decided to go ahead with the idea despite the eventual failures of the likes of Napster and Kaaza. While the ethics of such a strategy would require a lengthier discussion in an of itself, the founders clearly took a chance with something that other entrepreneurs might have balked at.

...YouTube allowed users to easily embed any hosted videos on web pages or blogs. This turned out to be particularly popular with social-networking websites, especially MySpace. The inbound links from these ‘widgets’ also helped YouTube increase its page rank on Google, thereby driving traffic via natural search..

Arun Natarajan is the Founder & CEO of Venture Intelligence, the leading provider of information and networking services to the Private Equity and Venture Capital ecosystem in India. View sample issues of Venture Intelligence India newsletters and reports.

Popular posts from this blog

How I Raised Funding - Priyanka Agarwal, Wishberry

By
You have to be confident and shameless while crowdfunding. Priyanka Agarwal, Wishberry shares on how to succeed in crowd funding with Venture Intelligence in this  interview. Priyanka also candidly shares how the team built Wishberry, raised funding from top angel investors like Rajan Anandan, on pivoting, and difficulties in raising capital for entrepreneurs operating in niche spaces not chased by VCs. Q: What does Wishberry do? Priyanka Agarwal : In its latest avatar, Wishberry has pivoted into crowd financing of low budget films (INR 1-5 Cr). We are essentially trying to create an internet platform for investment opportunities for HNIs in films including Marathi, Tamil, Kannada, or films targeting the global diaspora. L-R: Co-founders Anshulika Dubey & Priyanka Agarwal, Wishberry Given that you are building a marketplace, how did Wishberry solve the Chicken and Egg problem? Beyond the “all or nothing” model what did Wishberry do to pull in more artistes and inves
Read more

WTP: A Very Important Business Abbreviation

By
Did you know the most profitable car of sports car maker Porsche is actually its family friendly SUV Cayenne? Wait what! How? Enter building to Customer's Willingness to Pay (WTP). In a FirstRound.com post   Madhavan Ramanujam, Simon-Kucher & Partners , shares the story of Porsche's counter-intuitive move in the mid 1990s. In the mid 1990s Porsche's annual sales were a third of what they’d been the decade earlier when it almost died. The company badly needed a turnaround.  So Porsche "designed the car around what customers needed, valued and were willing to pay for – in short, around its price. All the items customers weren’t willing to pay for, like Porsche’s famous six-speed racing transmission, were thrown out, even if their engineers loved them." In contrast Fiat Chrysler, which was also looking for a hit, " focused its development process on engineering and design, settling on a price for the car at the very end .  Market performance wa
Read more

How doing Outsized Partnerships led Karadi down the Wrong Path

By
Business Line  has a fascinating account of the travails faced by Chennai-based children's entertainment and education brand, Karadi Tales, in its search for strategic / financial partners. Viswanath has been fire-fighting to keep afloat Karadi Tales (now a unit of Karadi Path), the company he and his wife Shobha founded in 1996. A distribution agreement with Times Music had landed them in court. And the merger with ACK Media (publishers of Amar Chitra Katha) and subsequent acquisition by Kishore Biyani’s Future Ventures didn’t pan out as expected.  ...The partnership (with Times Music) turned sour when there was a change in leadership at Times Music...When Viswanath cited the exit clause and asked for the agreement to be nullified, his partner refused to oblige and instead took him to court, which issued a stay order. Viswanath and his team, despite founding Karadi Tales, could no longer use the brand. “It took us two years to get out of the case,” says Viswanath, who als
Read more