{"id":698,"date":"2006-10-11T07:00:08","date_gmt":"2006-10-11T12:00:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=698"},"modified":"2006-10-11T07:04:34","modified_gmt":"2006-10-11T12:04:34","slug":"a-very-lucrative-offer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=698","title":{"rendered":"A Very Lucrative Offer"},"content":{"rendered":"

Everyone linked this story already, so I’m sure you’ve heard the news: Google has purchased YouTube for 1.5 billion<\/a>.<\/p>\n

YouTube hosts videos and lets people watch them for free. They incur massive storage and bandwidth fees, and they get nothing in return. Unless they find a way to convert movies of people falling over and getting hit in the head into currency, (which is not currently possible outside of Japan) it will continue to lose money. If the site becomes more popular, they will lose more<\/em> money. <\/p>\n

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This is just a taste of what Google got for its $1,500,000,000.00.<\/small><\/center><\/p>\n

How much do they lose? How many programmers and sysadmins does it take to keep the show running? How many lawyers are needed to deal with the low level legal sniping that is always going on against high-profile companies that tangle with intellectual property? How many accountants are required to compile the annual summary of how much money has been thrown down the rat hole? Do they hire a graphic artist to print out an 8×10 laminated bar graph of their profits as it plunges deeper into the red with each passing month? What is the bill at the and of all of this? Five million? Twenty-five million?<\/p>\n

I don’t have the numbers on hand and I lack the motivation to see if it is available online. So, in order to figure out the net annual losses of YouTube I’ll simply have to turn to the science of statistics. By calculating the average between my two random guesses, we can see that YouTube loses fifteen million dollars a year.<\/p>\n

My site here has much the same problem. It operates at a net loss, paying out about $11 in hosting fees each month and bringing in no income. If we count in annual domain renewal, then it becomes clear that our monthly losses may be as high as $12, or $144 annually. This means Twenty Sided makes $14,999,856 more than YouTube each year.<\/p>\n

\nDear Google,<\/p>\n

I would like to make it known that the site Twenty Sided is available for acquisition. Please realize that $14,999,856 is a lot of money, and if YouTube is worth 1.5 B<\/b>illion then you should expect to need some real<\/em> money if you want to get your hands on something as profitable as Twenty Sided. I’m including all of the archives in the sale, and if it helps to close the deal I’m even willing to stay on board in some sort of figurehead or advisory position while you hire the team that will work on the re-branding and creating future content. <\/p>\n

You don’t want to wait for this to turn into a bidding war, so please get in touch with me soon.<\/p>\n

Thank You,<\/p>\n

Shamus Young<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Everyone linked this story already, so I’m sure you’ve heard the news: Google has purchased YouTube for 1.5 billion. YouTube hosts videos and lets people watch them for free. They incur massive storage and bandwidth fees, and they get nothing in return. Unless they find a way to convert movies of people falling over and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-698","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=698"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/698\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=698"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=698"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=698"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}