Now, that’s what you call a popular birthday boy.

A mind boggling achievement that underlined its huge global popularity. As a measure of how popular it is, that number is nearly double the number of people who tune into the US’s three prime time TV stations combined, according to the site’s owner Google.

Google should be pleased as the number is 50 times higher than the 100 million daily hits that was on record when Google decided to buy YouTube in Oct 2006 for US$1.65 billion. This will not turn into a AOL-TimeWarner-like acquisition nor is it likely to burst into premature closure like the Google phone.

Technically, I believe the performance of YouTube is nothing short than amazing. Anyone who has tried to stream a video on internet will know how difficult it is to get a fast-smooth-good quality viewing experience. Once your video have more than 10 concurrent viewers – it’s even worse. Yet, with 5 billion viewers using the site – the video experience is consistently satisfactory. Considering our consistently reliable

broadband service, they are still good enough to watch.

Come to think of it, YouTube videos from across the Pacific Ocean is much easier to watch than the videos from local video streaming sites like Gua.com.my, TV3 etc. Why is that? Logically speaking, these local sites should be faster as they are within local network

and not burdened by international gateway bottleneck.

Anyway, here’s a big thank you for YouTube for changing the the web forever and for enabling us to Broadcast Yourself

.

To finish, here are a few videos that are noteworthy to watch:

• Me at the zoo the first ever video uploaded to YouTube on April 2005 by its co-founder Jawed Karim.
• Susan Boyle the audition for Britain Got Talent that has been watched 92 million times. p.s. Watch Simon Cowell at 1:51 and then his cheeky remark at 5:29
• Obama’s You Tube interview Barack Obama, then a U.S. Senator and Democratic presidential candidate, answer questions from YouTube in 2007.
• Lady Gaga: Bad Romance the most watched video on YouTube
• Charlie bit my finger

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It is a dilemma because in most cases the biggest hits on the web are sites that were not started to make money in the first place. Those that were started with the objective to make money, seldom did. Anybody among us who have tried their hands in building e-commerce sites, would most probably have experienced that bitter discovery. Making money on the web is hard (unless you join the dark side of porn or not-so-honest-MLM).

In Malaysia we’ve seen loads of money been thrown into sites like Catcha.com, Bluehyppo.com, Gua.com.my and innumerable others with negligible commercial success. Before anyone start self-humiliation thrashings, bear in mind that even global names like YouTube and Twitter is finding it hard to monetize the gazillions of traffic on their sites.

I don’t know what is the latest traffic count of YouTube today but you can bet that it’s huge. Now owned by Google that’s flooded with cash, they can afford to sustain but they’ll have to start to contribute to the bottom line soon. As far as I can see, Google is banking on the ad-supported model. You can see plenty of ads appearing on a layer above the YouTube videos nowadays. From what i can tell though, this model has not been bringing in the level of money required.

An interesting service is Twitter which has grown tremendously. Currently, they’re handling 50 million tweets a day, a 2000% increase from 2.5 million tweets per day in 2009.

With only 140 characters per post – certainly no room to squeeze in ad in the post.

Most of the Twitter users seldom visit Twitter websites either, relying on 3rd party apps to read and post their updates. So this make context-relevant Google-style ads on the website less effective.

The industry has been observing Twitter executives, how are they going to make money. And, until recently it seemed that they have no reliable plan in hand.

However, things have changed. Twitter has came up with a novel solution. They signed agreements with search giants Google, Yahoo and Microsoft – so that they have access to all public tweets. In turn, they can then develop whatever tools to process and publish Twitter posts as part of their live search results. Twitter call it ‘firehose’ of tweets (you know like firemen’s hose with unlimited gush of water) as opposed to the rate-limited API being used for free by 50,000+ applications today.

This back room data-mining

licensing arrangement has enabled Twitter to charge and collect money. It’s actually quite a good arrangement since the users are not affected directly. They never see any intrusive messages. Maybe there are privacy issues but public tweets are publicly available anyway.

What does it mean to us, mere mortals, though

The lesson here is – don’t just look for a direct way to make money.

Making money out of selling information has been available for a long time. The value of database has always been known though not utilised by many.

So if you have a popular blog, portal or applications, find out the characteristics of your traffic and think who will be interested in them? Maybe there’s somebody who is willing to pay for it.

It has long been predicted that online streaming video will be a real competitor to incumbent TV media platforms (free-to-air, cable and satellite). Various startups have been set to make this dream come true – but none has really been able to cut the mustard – despite some of them backed by serious money and large corporations.

In the USA, hulu.com is slowly getting the numbers and has recently gave the jitters to broadcasters there. As more and more TV programs being shown in hulu.com (sorry – malaysian viewers are blocked) advertisers are reportedly giving not-so-subtle hints that they will not advertise (or demanding significantly lower rates) if more TV programs are being made available on internet.

It was reported that online ad revenue in USA has fallen by 5% to $5.4 billion in the 2nd quarter this year. However, this is much lower drop than the 12% to 29% drop experienced by traditional media (print and TV) for the same period.

Back to the poor England fans:

The reason for the decision to stream the match on Internet is because the original rights holder for all England’s away games, Setanta, has gone bust. No other broadcaster has been able to meet Ukrainian FA asking price – so it has gone to the highest bidder – which in this case happen to be a digital sport specialist, Perform.

Is this going to be the watershed – setting the trend for online media to compete financially with traditional broadcasters? At first glance, one might think it to be far-fetched – but once you looked at it carefully – it will not be that far off.

Consider: if , say YouTube, take a fancy on 2016 Olympics in Rio De Janeiro – do you think they have the financial muscle to make a bid? You bet they could. The economics are there and they sure have the infrastructure to cater for the huge bandwidth requirement.

Even in Malaysia, the rate for broadcasting rights are not that big. Companies like Telekom, Maxis, Celcom and Digi are already used to splash on big events and they are easily able to outbid RTM, Astro or PrimaMedia for the next World Cup – if they wanted to. (Only their system and infrastructure may not be able to cater to the surge in traffic. Case in point – the big Blue crash during recent Raya. Let’s not talk about Streamyx eh.)

Just for the record – I’m a big fan of streaming media. My hit program ‘Ash Report’ on a streaming TV station Cyberjaya.tv had a strong following not just from Malaysia but also internationally. This is despite us being ahead of our time then… but aha… look like that We Shall Rise Again

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