Only A Moron Would Buy YouTube
Is YouTube the darling success story of Bubble 2.0 or a legal train wreck waiting to happen? Mark Cuban spoke about the uber-popular video uploading and sharing destination yesterday with a group of advertisers in New York.
Here are some snippets from a Reuters story on Mark’s comments:
“They are just breaking the law,” Cuban told a group of advertisers in New York. “The only reason it hasn’t been sued yet is because there is nobody with big money to sue.”
Cuban said “anyone who buys that (YouTube) is a moron” because of potential lawsuits from copyright violations.
“There is a reason they haven’t yet gone public, they haven’t sold. It’s because they are going to be toasted,” said Cuban, who has sold start-ups to Yahoo and CompuServe.
“User-generated content is not going away,” he said. “But do you want your advertising dollars spent on a video of Aunt Jenny watching her niece tap dance?”
“Somebody puts up something really good and you get, what, 60,000 viewers?” Cuban added during the event at Advertising Week in New York.
More Cubanisms from Mark’s blog, Blog Maverick:
Whats worse for Youtube is that there might finally be an economic model for the copyright owners to host their own videos. Advertisers are chomping at the bit to buy rich media advertising and copyright owners are chomping at the bit to provide them broadband content for their ads. (Of course we are just a year away from there being far more video available than advertisers, but thats a future blog entry)
So you can pretty well bet that every and any copyright owner is going to be jumping up and down telling Youtube to remove every bit of content with any copyrighted material. The double worse news for Youtube is that wont be easy.
So, is Mr. Cuban going over the edge here or is he shooting directly from the honest hip and spitting out what others are afraid to say?
