I was really pissed this morning there was not water in the house! I think water pressure is so low that water cannot reach the first floor! And since there was no clean bucket to fill with water for me to take a shower with, I use nylon bags, filled them up with water from the kitchen sink downstairs and used them to take a shower. Oddly enough I felt cleaner than usual afterwards!! But this is not what I want to talk about. I wan to casually explore how video content and bloging came in, hand in hand, to produce a new form of content delivery and why video content became so popular.
Kubbar.com was a good example of a content warehouse. The main reason for kubbar to close down was the increasing cost of bandwith given the increasing demand of such content generated by a growing number of users and thus the model was economically unfeasible where the only source of income for kubbar was banner advertisements. I believe kubber closed to somewhere in 2001.
Advertisers in the pre-2000 era gave up on internet advertising since it was not doing them any good because of the high cost of unwated clicks. Or clicks that does not translate into transactions i.e. Asian/Mideast/African internet traffic, let me give an example, if Amazon was paying to show and Ad for a new book on an advertising network, this ad was served 100 times for 100 different Americans. Chances are the 1 American might buy that book! On the contrary if the same ad was served 10,000 times on 10,000 different people from the middle east, chances are 1 out of 10,000 would buy that book from amazon. Assuming that each Ad serve would cost 1 fils, amazon paid 100 fils and got 1 book sold for America, on the other hand amazon paid 10 kd to sell 1 book for mideast users. International audience, or internet scum as I like call them, increased the advertising cost for everybody, consequently making the whole internet advertising industry unattractive for advertisers.
1 kd = 1000 fils for those mathematically challenged audience!
This led to many websites to shut down, or to partially shutdown many content delivery upstream i.e. music and video. Peer to peer was a good try to jump start the content delivery providers however piracy issues and spyware really slowed down the growth of that method of content delivery. In my humble opinion I think there are three main contributors for the revival of the internet marketing industry and content delivery. Geolocation technologies and geomarketing, embodied video players and the ease of content productions.
With Geolocation technologies advertisers are able to sevre their ads to a limited targeted segment by location i.e. only users in American. By doing so, advertisers were able to reduce their advertising costs thus getting better results out of their ads and a higher ROI then the pre-2000 era.
Embodied video players like Macromedia Flash made it easy for internet users to view content instead of classic approach of asking them to download a software and install it.
Most browsers come ready with flash, even if not, the flash plugin installation or upgrade is literally done with 1 mouse click! With better compression algorithms video quality is getting better and better thus resulting positively on the overall user experience nevertheless consuming less bandwidth for better video quality.
Once again the old business model of delivering high bandwidth-consuming content along with paid banners and now text-ads is once again feasible. A successful website that was able to capitalize on this model is youtube.com. With geo technologies at hand, youtube wisely allocates bandwith over regions, leaving internet scum like us down here in Kuwait and the mideast with lower internet bandwidth. Thats why watching a video on youtube is slower in this part of the world. and that is just financially justifiable.
As a casual observer I think a local content delivery warehouse is highly needed, but only when it becomes financially feasible to start one in this region do we expect to see one emerges or at least one of the old ones get resurrected.
Kubbar.com we miss you!
1 comment:
Talk about crash! and yes i've been told that the're cherry picking houses while leaving the rest of us dry without water. mo 7araam! we deserve a better government~!!
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