BUSINESS BLOGS
BUSINESS BLOGS
category: business
26 Feb 2009
related tags: Search Wars | Google | Twitter |

If only hindsight was a currency, John Battelle would be rich:

YouTube was the single fastest growing new form of search on the Web, and Google pretty much outflanked (and outspent) everyone to buy it. Not to get into video monetization, per se, but to harvest and control the most important emerging form of search. In short, Google could not afford to NOT own YouTube.

So, fast forward to today. What’s the most important and quickly growing form of search on the web today? Real time, conversational search. And who’s the YouTube of real time search? Yep. Twitter. It’s an asset Google cannot afford to not own.

But the reality is different, far different.  It’s a shame I have an NDA with YouTube and can’t get into the nitty gritty details, but trust me, YouTube was not bought because it was a search destination, it was to foray into online video and video advertising.  The fact that it has since turned into a major search destination has a lot to do with Google’s DNA infiltrating YouTube and oh, maybe I’d venture to say that YouTube has totally cornered the video content space… but I digress.

I still think that Twitter isn’t so much YouTube (as in, the latest in search, which means Google must own it) but rather Facebook, or should I say, it’s 2009’s version of Facebook: is it just me or was it just last year that the hippie love crowd was gawking all over Mark Zuckerberg’s site.  Expect an article in Fortune magazine sometime in 2010, I guess, talking about how Twitter rules our lives.

Don’t get me wrong: Biz Stone and Evan Williams project has certainly added an interesting twist in the ever-changing story involving news, citizen journalism, and yes, real time search, but last year at around this time, a lot of otherwise smart people thought that Facebook was about to torch the world, and now - from a purely business model perspective (hmm: as in revenues less costs) - all you see is a trail of smoke.

But where 2009 differs from 2008 (or in the YouTube sale to Google’s case, 2007), is that the market has changed, and having raised nearly tens of millions in financing at a valuation of $250M, Twitter just isn’t that much of a must-have to Google, who suddenly does not think that companies that cost $50,000 per annum to maintain are worth saving, even if just a couple of years ago they paid millions for them.