The Videographer's Apprentice

More than once I've read, on-line, the statistic that every minute 60 hours of video footage are uploaded to YouTube.  I find that number shocking.  I realize that YouTube has millions of users, but even so it seems like a lot of footage.  I think the "does not compute" part of my brain is mainly transfixed on the idea that there will always be more footage on YouTube than any single person could consume in a lifetime because the fire hose can't be shut off, and the influx is bound to increase over time.  I've had a few thoughts on the matter:

• Take a baby born today, with an assumed lifespan of 75 years.  Wait around for 7 days, 15 hours.  BAM!  They've already had an entire lifespan-worth of video footage uploaded, assuming they watch non-stop for the rest of their life.  Sleep is not an option.
• The last HD video I produced weighed in at 46 MB per minute.  Assuming that is a typical file size, every minute YouTube takes on 164 GB of data.  In a single day that's 236 TB of data.  Over a year they're logging 86 PB (that's PetaBytes, or 86x10^12)!  Where are they keeping it all?  At this rate won't the Google data center eventually have to occupy all available space on Earth just to host our inane videos?
• Assume that American television has 100 channels producing original programming.  (I think that's generous, but just assume.)  Assume that in a given year there's original content for 6 months of the year, and the original content is aired 6 days a week, and it amounts to 9 hours each day (morning, daytime, and primetime).  This means the professional content being broadcast in American each year is around 145,800 hours.  YouTube receives an equivalent amount of content every 40 hours!

It's a mind-boggling amount of video content.  It seems like a real waste of resources right now, but I expect it'll come in handy some day when we start sending people on interstellar exploration missions.  At least they'll have plenty of viewing options to choose from on the seat-back monitor as they make their way to Alpha Centauri.  Care for some peanuts?

Dear Facebook

To whom it may concern,

I understand, based on yesterday's news of your acquisition of Instagram, that you are in desperate need of a new VP of Merger's and Acquisitions over there.  Clearly somebody is allowing you to pay way too much for your newly acquired businesses, and I'd be glad to step in and put a stop to this nonsense.

Let's have a look at what you overpaid for Instagram.  By the numbers:

• 1 office
• 12 employees
• 30 million members

Here's what I'd offer:

• $500,000 for capital assets
• $500,000 per employee (roughly four times their average annual salary, I'm guessing)
• 12 x $500,000 = $6,000,000
• $671,000,000 for the members
• This assumes advertising revenue of $0.15 per week for 20% of the members over 20 years, accounting for inflation

Total Cost: $677.5M

For a total savings of: $322.5M!

You're welcome.  But before you let the old VP go, please have him set my new salary.

Sincerely,
David Sevy
Aspiring Facebook Executive

Livin' In The Cloud

The "cloud" is so over-hyped.  I'm not a big fan of doing things "in the cloud".  I'll take a local application over a thin client any day.

But putting data on-line is another matter.  How I love being able to drop my data in one spot and access it from anywhere with an Internet connection.  So cool.  I'm too cheap to pay for any sort of remote storage, but I've put a few good free alternatives to use.

The first was the Amazon Cloud Player.  This came about as a necessary way to get music onto the Kindle Fire.  The uploader works well, and the upload process took about two days.  You get 5 GB free, and I think I filled about 4 GB with my on-line collection.  It's not my whole collection, but a reasonable chunk of it for use on the Fire.  One cool feature was that tracks purchased from Amazon didn't have to be uploaded - they were automatically recognized and linked to the Cloud Player without any user input.

More recently, Google kicked-off their Play service.  The free music storage is much more generous on Play - up to 20,000 songs, each as big as 250 MB.  Sweet.  Google's uploader worked well too, and now my whole music collection is on-line and accessible everywhere.

I'm also in the process of taking advantage of Google's PicasaWeb albums to back up my photo collection.  This is no small collection, and backing it up is no small task.  Fortunately, the Picasa application is handling most of the work, but I did have to do a little bit of up-front prep to take advantage of their free storage.

PicasaWeb gives you 1 GB of free storage.  This is pretty much useless for storing any significant number of photos.  However, if you resize everything so that the image size is 2048x2048 (or less) then you can store those images for free!  Picasa will even do this resizing for you as it uploads, if requested.

The one limitation on this system is that uploaded photos go into an album, and albums are limited to 1,000 pictures.  There's no limit on the number of albums you can have.  Before I started uploading I split my photos into folders with 1,000 pictures or less, and currently I'm only about 4 folders (4,000 images) away from having everything on-line!  This will be about a 12-day upload when I'm done, but it could have been completed faster.  I've turned on a "Conserve Bandwidth" option in Picasa to throttle the upload so I don't affect other applications on the network.

I recognize that you get what you pay for with these kinds of services.  Although I like having data backed up "off site", I have no expectation that this data is 100% safe just because I've put it on-line.  I received no guarantee from Amazon or Google, and I realize that, which is why I have three different hard drives with all of my pictures here at home, and all of my CD's are still around if I need to go back to my original music.  Even so, it's nice to have everything conveniently available via the web, and even if it's not a guaranteed backup I still consider it another line of defense against the unthinkable: Total Data Loss.

How To Succeed In Internet Business (Without Really Trying)

The Internet is a funny thing.  It's so big and interconnected that it's easy to get caught up in the idea that you could do just about anything with it.  12 years ago I was going back to business school when the Internet boom was in full swing, and I had no doubt there must be something really cool I could do with the Internet to make money.

While in business school, in a marketing course, the teacher posed this question to the class: "What product are television networks selling?"  A lot of answers were proffered.  None of them were right, as I recall, and finally the professor had to clue us in.  Television networks sell ... their viewers!  Or, at least, a bit of their viewers attention.  Hold onto that concept - we'll come back to it momentarily.

Of course, just my luck, long before I graduated (it was only a two year degree!) the boom went bust, and the economy in general went with it.  When it came time to leave school not only was the Internet no longer a promising place to work, but just finding a job in any field was a challenge.

Fast forward to today.

The Internet is still with us, and it's going strong.  There are some Internet-only endeavors that have taken off (Amazon, Netflix) emulating or replacing brick-and-mortar businesses (Walmart, Blockbuster) but I think most on-line business presences are an extension of a business built elsewhere.  I may be oversimplifying things, but hopefully you get the gist.

Notably, two of the "giants" of the Internet are Google and Facebook.  And what is the product these companies are selling?  They're nothing more than the television networks of the digital age, bringing viewers to sit in front of a screen so that advertisers can connect with them.  The sneaky thing about this new media is that instead of spending big bucks to create content people want to see (e.g. game shows, dramatic series, and the evening news) they rely on all of us to entertain each other.  Sneaky though that may be, it also affords all of us an opportunity to profit from the enterprise.  It's only fair.

So here I am, participating in the new media economy, having recently "monetized" my own little on-line media empire.  I may get to cash in on the Internet after all, much to the satisfaction of my college-age self, but it turns out it's not going to replace my day job.

I'm only a month into this experiment, so these numbers have very little history behind them, but I thought I'd share them anyway.  At the moment I am the proud "broadcaster" of 5 monetized YouTube videos and one general-interest blog.  My oldest video has been on-line for about 18 months, and the total accumulated views of all five videos is currently 1,237.

According to Google AdSense, in February I had 58 hits on my videos, 9 of which clicked on ads, netting me $0.34 for the month.  This month is only 8 days in, but so far I've had 17 views, 5 which included ad clicks, netting me another $0.12.  If the trend for March holds I may be on track to make $0.46 this month, easily beating last month's record.

The good news: my view-to-click ratio has risen substantially (16% in February, 29% so far in March).  The bad news: AdSense has a minimum payment policy of $100, so if the current trend stays flat I shouldn't expect to see any payouts for another 302 months.

I've got plenty of time to figure out how to spend my advertising earnings, since the check won't be arriving until May of 2037.  I can hardly wait.