Bronte Media

Sometimes, you just have to laugh at the absurdity of ‘experts’. Take Josh Martin from IDC. Never met him, never heard of him, until today. But go and read a CNET wrap of a report he wrote on YouTube. It’s a clanger. If Josh Martin played basketball, I am sure the New York Knicks would draft him in the first round. It’s that bad.

Here’s the leader:

“Josh Martin, an IDC research analyst, issued a report Thursday asserting that YouTube will struggle to squeeze profits from its video-sharing business, primarily because its audience has grown accustomed to paying nothing for the service.”

Hey Josh why not sub in CBS or NBC for YouTube and video-sharing for Television and see if the logic holds up. The business model is called advertising. It’s a whole lot more profitable than subscriptions. Newspapers only offset a small fraction of the paper costs with subscriptions. Magazines give it all to newstands and try to nearly give away subscriptions. Why are people in love with subscriptions?

But the quality of content on YouTube is lower, Josh retorts. “The majority of the video clips involve budding musicians, comedians, filmmakers or just people clamoring for attention. Other clips are grittier. A viewer can often find clips of violent accidents and bloody shark attacks. Sometimes users post clips that include nudity and sexually graphic images.”

Who cares? YouTube, like MySpace, is in the Wal-Mart supermarket media business. Horribly low CPMs and insanely high usage. The books will balance. Murdoch will get a return on his $600m investment. But both businesses aren’t Yahoo or Google or eBay. They are much smaller but that doesn’t mean they aren’t businesses. I think that’s where people have the most problem. Accepting they can be businesses just not huge ones.

The title of the article is “Is YouTube a flash in the pan?”. YouTube’s traffic doubled last month. That’s right doubled. From insanely high numbers.

Although comscore data is far from reliable, he couldn’t have timed the report more poorly. In addition, NBC has just signed an advertising agreement to promote shows. Josh grasps at the straws by saying that users don’t want show promotions and prefer other content. Josh, I prefer watching the Amazing Race over the Viagra ads in the commercial breaks. THAT’S THE WAY THINGS HAVE ALWAYS BEEN.

I’ll wait with baited breath for the next insightful missive from Josh. If only for the humor value.