David Emery Online

Google Mojo

25 January 2007

Google have posted today on their blog about the future prospects of YouTube and Google Video.

Watch out guys: Google’s got their mojo back.

During 2005 and well into 2006 Google was really having problems. Not from a money problems obviously; like Microsoft before them they’ve managed to get themselves into a incredibly lucrative position in the market place. The problem was that everything “new” that was coming out of Google’s doors was falling short and faltering when it reached the public. Look at Google Video, Gtalk, Google Page Creator, Google Base and more for examples of this.

Luckily for Google early autumn last year they bought a little known San Bruno based startup – demonstrating at least that they weren’t going to disappear quite yet.

The announcement today that Google Video is going to concentrate on video search, leaving the user-content side to YouTube makes a huge amount of sense on all sorts of levels. Firstly, Google is bound to be currently investing a huge amount of R&D on video search so it can effectively start doing video advertising; both traditional adwords-style text ads around YouTube videos and true video adverts in the future. The video advertising space is going to be an arms race amongst the various major online advertisers and Google is bound to be ahead of the pack; passing on the technology that powers its advertising on to consumers in the form of search is something Google has been doing for years.

Secondly, this is a rather neat way of quietly dropping Google Video, which has never been a successful arrow in Google’s bow, despite arguably having better technology behind it then YouTube. They can – and will – now happily move this tech, including payments systems, DRM, and the ability for content producers to sell their videos over to YouTube without having to worry about the affect on their own video site.

While I’m sure this will open the way for purchasable videos on YouTube I’m still not convinced this is the model that’s going to end up working – especially for the kind of content currently on there; who would pay money for 99% of the videos on YouTube? No, it’s going to be all about the advertising – and Google is the king of advertising.