How much money you think they could have made of ads? Expecially yahoo ads I don't even want to think about it
They are indeed in a bad position and it's hard to monetise the traffic. Their problem is twofold. They get a lot of untargetted traffic that crashes their servers and their business. They lose a lot of targetted traffic that visits YouTube and as a result they lose credibility. Google Results for Utube I don't believe it's easy to convice a brick and mortar company with a 125,000 Sq. Ft warehouse that sells equipment priced in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to use CPM on their business website. Even if they make money for a while they will be killing their credibility and their established business in the long term. For a site like this one targetted visitor worths thousands of times more than 1000 untargetted visitors
Seems to me that the only REAL way to make money from this mess, would be to have some sort of affiliate program pointing traffice TO youtube.com If the traffic is only coming to the site by accident, how much money are you going to make on on-page advertisements based on content? industrial plumbing machinery vs. stupid pop culture nothingness
Google should have just bought utube.com instead. They could have 301'ed the domain to Google Video for a lot less than $1.65 billion. I just told my g/f this story and she said "Oh yeah, I always think its utube and I've been on that site loads of times."
I would sell my domain to Google in a heartbeat. Of course, I'd have to have some guarantee that they would transfer my "age" and NOT "sandbox" my new domain.
They should do some research to see whether their country extension TLD is buyable (contact seller), offer google a reasonable price for the domain utube.com and move on. They should easily be able to get around a million for that sort of traffic, if they cant sell it.. simply monetize it. They arent doing themselves any favours by keeping it like it is.
But how do you monetize it??? If people are coming to that site by accident, why would any sort of CPC campaign help? I mean, wouldn't most people, at the second they realized they were on a pipe making machine company's website, when they're looking for videos, just head out? Who would stop to read adsense content for things related to plumbing?
That's a good question, it won't have targeted visitors, but will have many. I would simply park the domain name
As sandossu said - One way is to park it but then you leave yourself open to a possible cybersquatting case. If I personally owned the domain I would build up a large base of articles relating to their field (piping?), with a little bit of research into high paying keywords and some simple ad placement they could probably turn over at least a couple thousand per month. A vast majority of teenagers visit myspace and because "utube" is textspeak as such, you can bet a large majority of the type in traffic are teens aswell. Based on my own (limited) experience with teen targetted websites they tend to click on ads purely out of curiosity, they may not even be interested but if they target the right keywords they may be able to achieve $5.00 a click. One possible obstacle is that its Google now owns youtube.com - so I'm pretty sure you can rule them out as a publisher candidate. The possibilities are endless really, but with Myspace being such a large US targeted brand you could really make some good money with not even a little thought.
even if you owned a piping business with a 125,000 Sq. ft facility? why would they want to make a couple thousand per month when they are using the site to run their business
I heard a short interview with the owner of UTUBE on the radio last night. They were getting 200-300 hits per month before this happened. Webmasters from all over the world have been calling and emailing them. They tried to contact Google by email but never got any replies. It sounds like they finally got through to some one at Gplex and, my guess is, that G will buy the domain... that should at least pay for their new hosting service expenses EDIT: The site is down... looks like the move to the new host isn't complete yet
I really dont see where they are getting this traffic from. They rank high for the keyword search "utube" At most I would give it 5,000 searches per day. They shouldnt generate over 10,000 page views a day because mostly everyone will leave the site after they see the homepage. Looking at the competition a monkey can rank high for that keyword so I dont see what the big deal on the domain is unless people are typing in "www.utube.com" in their browser.
I wish I had those problems... It isn't hard to create a new domain for the mortar and company business, and park the other one. Ok, it requires some work to spread the new domain for your customers, but if the revenue is worth it...