Author Archive for Robert Young
By Robert Young
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Thursday, April 19, 2007 |
1:00 AM PT |
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(Editor’s Note: The following piece was co-authored with Scott Karp, editor of Publishing 2.0.)
One by one, the big media companies and the Internet giants have started to ante up for the big poker game over the future of the video content business. Google started it all with its acquisition of YouTube. Then GE’s NBC-Universal and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp responded by joining forces to create “NewCo,” which Comcast, the country’s largest cable company, also just joined.
Sumner Redstone’s CBS followed with the announcement of their own independent distribution initiative, called the “CBS Interactive Audience Network.” Standing alongside these big media giants are all the biggest Internet portals, including Yahoo!, AOL, and MSN. What has essentially happened, in a very short period, is that most of the existing Internet and media establishment have lined up on one side of the fence in support of each other, all against GooTube!
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By Robert Young
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Monday, March 26, 2007 |
12:41 PM PT |
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When one is asked about Google’s incredible success to date, and what they did so right, the obvious answer will likely involve an explanation of the brilliant technologies that make up PageRank and Adwords. But if one looks under the hood, there’s also a not-so-obvious reason that played an equally critical role in Google’s success: the fact that the web has been predominately comprised of text.
Text affords Google the friendliest technological and legal environments to apply and optimize its superior algorithms. But what happens in a future where video, not text, is the fundamental element of the web? If Google cannot translate and convert the advantages it had in a text-dominated web into a future web of videos, Google is in trouble. Continue reading
By Robert Young
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Thursday, March 1, 2007 |
3:21 PM PT |
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By Robert Young
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Sunday, February 25, 2007 |
12:42 PM PT |
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Reading through the LA Times, as I do before The Oscars every year, I came across a fantastic Op-Ed written by a respected Hollywood author by the name of Neal Gabler. The opinion piece, titled “The Movie Magic is Gone”, explains how Hollywood is losing its place as the epicenter of cultural products and how movies are losing their relevance as the “barometers of the American psyche”.
And what is culprit? You guessed it… the rise of social media! As Gabler elaborates:
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By Robert Young
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Tuesday, February 20, 2007 |
12:40 AM PT |
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There has been much debate about the merits of Viacom’s recent decision to demand the take-down over 100,000 of its copyrighted video clips on YouTube, which included video assets from MTV, Comedy Central, and other Viacom-owned brands. Well, ‘debate’ is probably not an accurate word to use here, as there seems to be an overwhelming consensus within the blogosphere that Viacom did a very dumb thing.
As only he can, Jeff Jarvis eloquently summarizes the general consensus in his latest Guardian column, echoing the prevailing sentiment that Viacom’s move against YouTube represents yet another ill-fated attempt by the old media guard to regain command & control in the ever-elusive new media world.
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By Robert Young
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Monday, February 5, 2007 |
7:00 AM PT |
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As we all know, one of the biggest stories in 2006 was about a deal that never happened. Despite multiple rumors of buyout offers from various suitors, Facebook rejected them all and decided to stay independent. Now, whether that was a smart decision, or a stupid one, is likely to be one of the big stories of 2007. In either case, the key-determining factor will rest on how well Facebook monetizes this year.
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By Robert Young
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Friday, January 26, 2007 |
1:00 AM PT |
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A former mentor, and a very smart man, once told me that the greatest invention in this democracy and capitalist system we live in and know as the United States is, of all things, bankruptcy. Yep, bankruptcy… the opportunity to fail.
I mention this because I believe Jeremy Liew, venture capitalist at Lightspeed and subsequently, James Hong of Hotornot.com, posted some “must-read” thoughts and observations on this topic. In fact, I would encourage every entrepreneur to read what Jeremy and James just blogged.
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By Robert Young
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Monday, January 22, 2007 |
11:00 AM PT |
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The title of this piece is a quote from Nancy Robinson, VP & Consumer Strategist at Iconoculture (from this recent CNET article). Now that’s a great quote! It’s right up there with something a very close friend/mentor used to say in the early ‘90s… “let’s put the Me back in Media!” (That was the late John Evans, former right-hand exec to Rupert Murdoch.)
I consider the remote control, first commercialized in 1956, one of the greatest inventions in electronics. It’s so ridiculously simple, yet that little device was powerful enough to dramatically impact the evolution of the TV & cable industries. Think about it… without the remote control, there would be no interface to manage hundreds of channels, no serendipitous discovery of new shows enabled by channel-surfing during commercial breaks, no watching two or three shows simultaneously by clicking back and forth between channels.
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By Robert Young
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Monday, January 15, 2007 |
11:30 AM PT |
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Lately, I’ve been thinking through an oft-discussed scenario involving MySpace… one that I have good reason to believe is now highly likely in 2007. What if MySpace suddenly decided to put up tollbooths and all the players within the MySpace third-party ecosystem had to start paying the mothership access fees?
Without doubt, a strategic shift in policy by MySpace along such lines could cause significant ripples, if not outright panic, among many of those vested in the MySpace economy.
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By Robert Young
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Thursday, January 4, 2007 |
7:00 PM PT |
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The most important market challenge for social networks in 2007 can be summarized in three words: monetization, monetization, and monetization.
Regardless of whether social networks will splinter into niches and verticals (e.g. sports, pets, moms, teenage girls, etc.), regardless of whether social networks adopt interoperability (e.g. OpenID), regardless of whether individual profile pages morph into widgetized and personalized start-pages, regardless of whether 2007 will be the year that social networking goes mobile… all such market development activities will prove secondary to a much more fundamental issue.
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