BUSINESS BLOGS
BUSINESS BLOGS
category: business
24 Mar 2008

Justin.tv was a first mover in the latest bubble in the online video space: streaming yourself to the Web, a service that has quickly become a commoditized black hole for investors to flush their money down the toilet.

The company is bragging about how after one year they have 57 years of programming on their site [UPDATE: I spoke too soon, apparently, a lot of the content are illegal Arabic-league soccer games… WTF].

Rightfully, that is a lot of content and if I were Justin.tv, I would stress it, too. To put things into context: after 2 years of producing content, WatchMojo.com has produced hundreds of hours of programming. So granted, 57 years is a helluva lot of content. But that being said, at the risk of sounding like Dick Cheney, all I can say is: so what?

That stat captures the state of online video: plenty of crap, very little quality. If you want to imagine how advertisers are reacting to this milestone, think of Bruce Springsteen’s tune “57 Channels and Nothing On’”.

Pardon my bearishness on the category, but this is just more content that advertisers don’t want, and one more area where investors won’t see a return on their money. I don’t care who says what: advertisers have shun UGC, they’ll shun this type of content even more.

Having content is one thing, the next question is: will people watch it?

“Justin.tv is building a destination site for broadcasting and watching live video online while chatting with friends. The company’s mission is to enable viewers and broadcasters to interact and exchange ideas in real time through chat and live video.”

Justin.tv - and their ilk - are not only competing to become a destination (which is very challenging), but so far they are having a challenge getting people to return (the orange part doesn’t look too sizable, if you ask me, percentage wise… when you consider how sticky their mission should make them out to be):

The bigger problem is that YouTube can crush all of these companies with a nudge, because people with something to say will want as wide of an audience as they can reach… and said audience is on YouTube. What made me laugh was that one of Justin.tv’s competitors is building its audience on YouTube. Hmm… that sounds like defeat before the warning bells go off, if you ask me.

I won’t name which one, but the point is, these business plans are pretty hollow, but it sure is easy to emphasize a meaningless stat to suggest everything is hunky dory. Can you imagine a social networking site aspiring to become the next MySpace or Facebook advertising or promoting themselves on MySpace or Facebook?