DISQUS

VC Watcher · 3 years ago

"YouTube was founded in February 2005 by Chad Hurley (CEO), Steve Chen (CTO), and Jawed Karim (advisor) who were all early employees of PayPal" (Wikipedia).

Sure looks like being a PayPal alum provides a unique competitive advantage over other less-connected "scrappy entrepreneurs". Especially in paying those $1M/mo bandwidth bills (Forbes, "Your Tube, Whose Dime?", 4/28/06).

Maybe you should check out Wikipedia and Forbes Matt, before you make up your Q&A list. You missed the obvious. :-)

Matt Marshall · 3 years ago

That's a fair pot-shot, VC Watcher: I often absent-mindedly omit information/context that I should really include for readers. So yes, in this case I probably should have mentioned that this is a former PayPal guy who backed former PayPal employees. However, I've met these guys, and they are young and, in my view, scrappy. I don't want to sound apologetic here, but Sequoia's not going to back you just because you knew one of their partners. But true, if you *do* know one of their partners, and they respect you and trust you, sure, you have an unfair advantage.

Adam · 3 years ago

According to the linked article on Mercury News YouTube only has 12.5 Million Unique visitors a month. Conversly, one of our video sharing sites (http://videos.streetfire.net) has only 4 million unique visitors a month (according to our Server logs on Unique cookied visitors). I don't understand how YouTube's Alexa ranking is as high as it is with such a low unique visitor ranking..unless this is a misprint. StreetFire has a 3 month average Alexa reach of 221 and YouTube's reach is 17,870. With only 3 times the monthly visitors how can their Alexa "reach per million" be 80 times higher?

Am I just misreading something here, but this seams very off?

Matt Marshall · 3 years ago

Adam, good points. I went and checked with our reporter, and with YouTube, and here's what I got:

The 12.5M uniques was April's number and April's numbers dipped from March -- and they dipped for just about everyone, except Myspace. Nielsen/Netratings weren't willing to release May numbers last weekend, when the Merc was closing the story.

So Nielsen/Netratings are slow to publish, and we are now in June, and the most recent figures we can print are April, which itself was a weak month. YouTube’s folks tell us they are “confident” the numbers will have exponentially risen since April (view count has increased by 20M videos, they say). So we will have to wait until May figures are out to see if there’s a better correlation with Alexa. Finally, as I’m sure you’re aware, Alexa numbers aren’t that reliable either.