Cuban: Youtube, we hardly knew you
Despite YouTube's instant popularity, mega-buzz, recent deals and massive traffic, Mark Cuban has written of the coming dramatic decline of YouTube.
Basketball team owner and blogger Cuban knows this space pretty well, having made a few billion off of the sale of Broadcast.com to Yahoo in 1999. Ahh, those were the days.
The fact that Youtube is building a traffic juggernaut around copyrighted audio and video without being sued is like.... well Napster at the beginning as the labels were trying to figure out what it meant to them. ... It's just a question of when Youtube will be hit with a charge of inducing millions of people to break copyright laws, not if.
Take away all the copyrighted material and you take away most of Youtube's traffic. Youtube turns into a hosting company with a limited video portal. Like any number of competitors out there that decided to follow copyright law. So, whilst Warner Music Group Corp. has agreed to distribute and license its copyrighted songs and other material through YouTube,
Kudos to WMG for giving them a chance and probably leveraging the hell out of Youtubes traffic, but this is just one copyright owner out of the thousands, if not tens of thousands owning copyrights that are most likely being illegally used on Youtube.
Given YouTubes' darling status at the moment, this is a pretty bold prediction from Cuban, wouldn't you say?
Technorati Tags: social.media, youtube
Tuesday, September 19, 2006
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