How They Did It

Everyone who reads this blog knows that I love YouTube and am pleased that the founders got such a great outcome for themselves. I posted that last week.

I was going to leave this subject to others and move on to more interesting stuff today, but my friend Al suggested that I re-run this post I penned in early May of this year called How YouTube Kicked Google’s Ass (and everyone else’s too).

I told him it’s going to look like "I told you so" and I don’t want to do that. He said that the bit about how they did it is worth adding to the conversation that’s going on today about the deal.

So here’s that part. I hope you like it:

YouTube wasn’t first and they didn’t beat the big guys to market.
But they did do three things, that in combination secured them a
leadership position that to me looks pretty unassailable.

First they launched with a really slick flash player that almost
everyone else has now copied. They bet on flash and they were right.
For video playback on the web, flash is the way to go.

Second, they provided immediate playback. When Google Video launched, I uploaded a video and had to wait for days to see it playback.  Needless to say, I’ve never uploaded another video to Google.

Third, and this is the biggie, they provided an easy way to embed
their flash player and a specific video in another web page. This too
has been copied by most everyone in the online video business. But if
you go back and look at YouTube’s traffic, the day they let people
embed their videos in MySpace pages is the day they took off and never
looked back.

If you want to read the entire post, click on the link above. There are some great comments to the post as well.

Now, on to other stuff.

#VC & Technology