Tom Guarriello reads a Wall Street Journal story warning that YouTube and MySpace could be fads, citing Facebook's acquisition talks and Google's $900 million guarantee to MySpace. He asks viewers whether these platforms will last or vanish like dot-com bubble companies.
Well, hi YouTubians, it's Tom Guarriello. Just read something today that caught my attention and I thought maybe I'd make a quick video about it. I don't know how many of you guys read the Wall Street Journal. You know, Wall Street Journal is one of those newspapers that people think is very, you know, specialized and you know, that they might not get a lot out of it if they weren't like, if you're not like business people or big-time investors. But the Wall Street Journal's got lots and lots of really interesting stuff in it. And one of the, the main articles on the front page today, Thursday the 21st, is an article about Facebook. And you guys know what Facebook is, right? It's this social media site, kind of a community for— it started up only university-based people could be members of Facebook and have others share in their Facebook pages and so on, and it became really popular. So here's the article about Facebook, and it just made me really— triggered some thoughts. They're talking about, about what's going on with Facebook and the possibility of Facebook being sold. And it says people familiar with the matter say that the company has held separate acquisition talks with Yahoo, Microsoft, and Viacom. Now some of those people say the startup is in a serious discussion again to sell itself to Yahoo for an amount that could approach $1 billion. That's a B, billion dollars. Now they talk about how sites like My— like Facebook and rival MySpace have become web hangouts for coveted market, young people. There might be a few of those here. And in August, Google guaranteed MySpace $900 million in revenue for ads over the next 3 years. Here's the thing that I really found interesting. The danger of building a business around networking sites, it says, and YouTube YouTube is clearly a networking site, is the fickle nature of their consumers. And that was what got me, the fickle nature of their consumers, because that brought back something that many of us have experienced, and that is the bubble. If you were around in 2000, 2001 paying attention to what was happening, you saw the bubble. You know, lots of companies went gone, lots of money went to, as I like to say, Money heaven. Flew away. Some of it was mine. Flew away to money heaven. So the thing that, that this brought to me is, is YouTube a bubble? Is YouTube a fad that's going to be gone within a year? Or is it something else? And if it's something else, what is it? So I don't know. I'm asking you, if you have any thoughts, let me know what you think. Make videos, write comments, let me know what you think. Is YouTube a bubble Or isn't it? Thanks, see you, bye. Oh, and like Steve Jobs would say, just one more thing. How about MySpace? You guys that spend a lot of time on MySpace, what do you think? Is MySpace a bubble or is MySpace something that's going to last a long time? I'd really like to hear your thoughts on that too. Thanks.
