- how do you see them dealing with copyrights of content? I don't think they will make much of profit if are willing to share $ with photography owners. The majority of value in Pinterest's user experience is that its fresh and content is created (pinned) by other users, NOT by corporations. The moment you will see every other picture a picture of an Ikea Kettle (or desk, or anything else thats been uploaded as "promoted pin") that resembles in color, shape, etc to what you were looking for, entire experience will loose its cool and Pinterest will start to stink!
> Youtube: [...]
- this was a huge gamble from many perspectives and owners had amazing amount of luck. Due to copyright issues, some board members were pressed very hard to vote with for a buy, but were strongly against (sorry I cannot back this up, but I read it somewhere couple years ago). Further, Viacom shoot itself in the foot by uploading their own material, but during discovery it clearly came up that owners knew about copyright infringement (duh!) and were willing to "slow down" with taking content down to gain more attraction. Clearly, in # of users AND eventual exit, they benefit in huge way off of Viacom content. Again, they were extremely lucky and in the light of recent Kim DotCom case, even more lucky Mashable is not interviewing them in a jail cell. But AFAIK some court cases Goog vs Viacom are still pending. As of whether it will turn out to be a huge success, I think we still need to wait. People are social today like never before. Instagram you mentioned was bought because FB was afraid of its growing userbase. As we both know, YouTube is only a little bit social -- not as social as comparing Instagram to Flickr, for example. If the userbase of the next thing (video) of sites like viddly will keep growing, and at some point owners will tell Google "fuck off, we ain't selling!", I say YouTube will be screwed. Also, if you look even further in the future, it obviously won't be as cool as today, or 3 years ago. Its like with Caddilac - they are building amazing cars for 110 years now, but if you ask your son: do you want Caddilac or Honda, guess what he will say.
Pinterest is not without risk but the potential is huge and it has many obvious monetization options. Risks include:
- clones and insufficient network effect;
- spammers/marketers creating noise;
- someone does recommendation better than they do.
I suspect Pinterest will either need to or should adopt a revenue sharing model with "pinners", copyright holders, etc with revenue coming from affiliate or affiliate-like sources (ie from driving traffic to a site in the case where the same item is sold from multiple sources).
I see the wedding market being particularly huge for this. Wedding planning essentially comes down to selecting a huge number of different things (clothing, where to have the ceremony/reception, food, decorations, etc etc etc) and this could be a really great platform for hosting that sort of thing and tying it in with recommendations.
Twitter as a counterexample I view as ultimately doomed. IMHO within 5 years it will be bought by one of the big players. They haven't come up with a good way to monetize it yet because there isn't one.
> Youtube: [...]
> ... owners had amazing amount of luck ...
Every man and his dog, prior to Youtube, had been trying to do VoD (video on demand) for years. 1-2 new startups appeared every month. I certainly agree there was a timing element in play but Youtube was also the most accessible and easiest to use. Everyone else was terrified of the bandwidth costs. Youtube had the courage to burn through an incredible amount of money to become "the" place for online video-sharing. That could easily have become a disaster instead.
As far as rightsholder issues go, I think Youtube is the poster-child for "it's easier to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission".
As much as people (myself included) have criticized Facebook's privacy blunders I do agree with Zuck on one point: you need to drag people kicking and screaming into the future. What people jump up and down about today they won't blink an eyelid at 5 years from now. Innovation is brinkmanship.
> Twitter as a counterexample I view as ultimately doomed. IMHO within 5 years it will be bought by one of the big players. They haven't come up with a good way to monetize it yet because there isn't one.
didnt you just say this: Just because you don't see potential doesn't mean there isn't any in your previous post?
> As far as rightsholder issues go, I think Youtube is the poster-child for "it's easier to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission".
I agree with you, but lets wait until all lawsuits settle or be resolved, and then see if they were forgiven. I am obviously not talking about the initial owners.
> you need to drag people kicking and screaming into the future. What people jump up and down about today they won't blink an eyelid at 5 years from now
It would be obvious Zack would say something like that, considering the service he is building. I am not sure if I like this approach anyways. While most people work on innovation the right way, there is lots of jaw dropping stuff coming up as well. On the privacy stuff, one day you may wake up with Police Drone in your backyard determining if that blue spot on your Google Maps picture was a swimming pool you haven't paid taxes for, or just a covered blocks of wood.
> Pinterest: [...]
- how do you see them dealing with copyrights of content? I don't think they will make much of profit if are willing to share $ with photography owners. The majority of value in Pinterest's user experience is that its fresh and content is created (pinned) by other users, NOT by corporations. The moment you will see every other picture a picture of an Ikea Kettle (or desk, or anything else thats been uploaded as "promoted pin") that resembles in color, shape, etc to what you were looking for, entire experience will loose its cool and Pinterest will start to stink!
> Youtube: [...]
- this was a huge gamble from many perspectives and owners had amazing amount of luck. Due to copyright issues, some board members were pressed very hard to vote with for a buy, but were strongly against (sorry I cannot back this up, but I read it somewhere couple years ago). Further, Viacom shoot itself in the foot by uploading their own material, but during discovery it clearly came up that owners knew about copyright infringement (duh!) and were willing to "slow down" with taking content down to gain more attraction. Clearly, in # of users AND eventual exit, they benefit in huge way off of Viacom content. Again, they were extremely lucky and in the light of recent Kim DotCom case, even more lucky Mashable is not interviewing them in a jail cell. But AFAIK some court cases Goog vs Viacom are still pending. As of whether it will turn out to be a huge success, I think we still need to wait. People are social today like never before. Instagram you mentioned was bought because FB was afraid of its growing userbase. As we both know, YouTube is only a little bit social -- not as social as comparing Instagram to Flickr, for example. If the userbase of the next thing (video) of sites like viddly will keep growing, and at some point owners will tell Google "fuck off, we ain't selling!", I say YouTube will be screwed. Also, if you look even further in the future, it obviously won't be as cool as today, or 3 years ago. Its like with Caddilac - they are building amazing cars for 110 years now, but if you ask your son: do you want Caddilac or Honda, guess what he will say.