My favourite billionaire sports-team-owning blogger, “Megaphone” Mark Cuban, had a blog post yesterday about how Hulu — the streaming video site from NBC — is “kicking YouTube’s ass,” a theory that has been getting some reaction from various places in the blogosphere today. The reason for the post would be fairly obvious to regular readers of Blog Maverick even if Mark didn’t point it out, but to give him credit, he has put it right there in the lede of his post:

“It is coming up on 2 years post my declaration that only a moron would buy Youtube and that Google was crazy for actually going through with it.”

In a nutshell, Mark argues that “the Youtube business model is broken, and there is no light at the end of the tunnel as they are currently constructed.” Why? Because they can’t sell ads, and never will be able to, and therefore YouTube “has become the poster child for the old saying ‘we are losing money on every sale, but we will make it up in volume’.” Meanwhile, he says, Hulu is selling pre-roll and post-roll and every-other-kind-of-roll ads on their clips at YouTube, which drive traffic to their site, on which they sell ads — and so on. RIP, YouTube.

I think Mark has a point as far as YouTube’s monetization goes — but it’s a very small point. Yes, YouTube may have difficulty selling as many pre-roll and post-roll and other kinds of ads as Hulu can, since Hulu has the kind of mainstream, TV-style content that advertisers love. At the same time, however, pre-roll and post-roll aren’t the only kinds of video monetization, especially when you’re Google. And YouTube looks to be branching out as well.

I also think that Ashkan Karbasfrooshan of WatchMojo has a point when he says that to some extent YouTube and Hulu are apples and oranges. In other words, they are kicking different asses, so to speak. People go to Hulu to watch episodes of House or The Sarah Connor Chronicles or whatever, and people go to YouTube to see the latest funny cat video or something equivalent — those are two very different needs, and both valuable. Terry Heaton makes a similiar point on his blog.

Basketball-team owner and billionaire TV dance-show star (what a mouthful that is) Mark Cuban has some thoughts about Google’s OpenSocial effort and the competition with Facebook. Among other things he says in his post — such as the fact that he suggested to Yahoo that they convince Facebook to license its API — Mark says Google may well be too late to the social-networking party.

Why? Because people hate entering their personal info into a bunch of different sites, he says. And if Facebook makes its API much more open than it has already, allowing the data it already has to move freely both in and out, then it will effectively be in the driver’s seat as far as its 50 million users are concerned — regardless of what Google and its OpenSocial partners do. I’m paraphrasing, but I think that’s the gist.

Joe Duck thinks that Mark is being too harsh, and that he’s just being lazy. Which may be true. But I would argue that most people are similarly lazy. Not because they literally can’t be bothered to type things in, but because they may not see any benefit to doing so — and some may even be approaching “social-networking fatigue.”

Would Facebook try to go it alone, and open up its own proprietary API rather than join the Google train? I don’t really know. But if it did try to do that, laziness — in effect, inertia — might keep many of those Facebook users and their data right where they are. Tim O’Reilly has some thoughts about the social Web and how best to make it work, and as usual they are well worth reading.

Update:

Mark Cuban says that the Warner deal proves nothing, since we don’t know any of the details, and that it reminds him of when Bertelsmann AG did a deal with Napster not long before the company had to close its doors and file for bankruptcy. You gotta give Mark credit — he sticks to his guns :-)

Original post

In case you needed any further confirmation that the state of online media is in turmoil, there’s a great example today with the news that Warner Music is working with YouTube to license its music to the massively popular video-sharing site. That’s one end of the spectrum of reaction to what’s happening with media. Then there was Universal Music rattling the sabres at a recent conference, and saying that YouTube was stealing from the label and owed them millions of dollars. That’s the other end of the spectrum.

It’s ironic (or at least a funny coincidence) that just as the Warner deal emerges, former online-media mogul and billionaire sports-team owner Mark Cuban writes a blog post about the decline of YouTube, and how the site is doomed because — among other things — it uses a lot of bandwidth and relies on copyrighted material for a lot of its traffic. As far as Mark is concerned, YouTube is just like Napster and will be hit with the same lawsuits, and likely be found guilty of inciting people to breach copyright, just like Grokster and Kazaa were.

I happen to think that the principle of “fair use” still covers things like using a Talking Heads song as the soundtrack for your kid’s bar mitzvah or whatever, but IANAL (that’s geek shorthand for “I am not a lawyer”). However, Mark also argues that there’s no need for YouTube because the major labels — and by extension the TV networks — can do their own deals and bypass YouTube, and that’s where I think he is most wrong. Sure they could, and they likely will. But why not use the massive traffic and name recognition that YouTube has going for it?

They would be stupid not to, just as the record labels were stupid not to find some way of working with Napster instead of beating it into the ground with lawsuits. Warner Music’s deal may have a lot of question marks still, but it is taking the path of least resistance, while Universal is stuck in the dark ages. Mark Evans has some thoughts too. Oh yes, and Jason Calacanis agrees with Mark Cuban, but he is also wrong. Rafat at PaidContent says that the labels may take a stake in YouTube, and ArsTechnica says that Warner has had a conversion on the road to Damascus, just like Paul.

Update:

Mark Cuban says that the Warner deal proves nothing, since we don’t know any of the details, and that it reminds him of when Bertelsmann AG did a deal with Napster not long before the company had to close its doors and file for bankruptcy. You gotta give Mark credit — he sticks to his guns :-)

Well, I have to give Jeff Jarvis credit — not just for being a tireless standard-bearer for the “new” journalism (even if I do disagree with him a tiny bit now and then), but for being able to write a post that gets a response from Mark Cuban, the irascible blogger and billionaire Dallas Mavericks owner who is himself something of a maverick. How Jeff did that probably won’t come as much of a surprise: he wrote about Cuban’s experiment in business journalism, an investigative site called Sharesleuth.

The idea behind Sharesleuth is relatively simple — Mr. Cuban hired a journalist to do in-depth reporting about dubious publicly-traded companies. The twist is that the billionaire plans to sell the shares of his targets “short” (shorts sell borrowed stock, hoping that the price will go down, at which point they can buy back enough shares to repay the loan at a lower price and pocket the difference as profit). His first target is a company called Xethanol, which is painted as a thinly-disguised stock-pumping scheme involving various disreputable characters.

Jeff’s problem appears to be that Mark is pitching Sharesleuth as the kind of journalism that protects the little guy (who is getting taken advantage of by such stock schemes), but in reality it’s just a way of making more money for Cuban himself. In other words, not journalism. He also takes some shots at the billionaire for effectively lucking into his wealth by selling to stupid companies at the right time — something that clearly gets Cuban’s dander up. Unfortunately, he responds with what I think is an overly defensive post entitled “I know you are but what am I, Jeff?

Cuban takes Jeff to task because his blog is unbalanced and unfair, which is a total red herring, since it’s unlikely that Jeff would claim that what his blog does is journalism in any sense of the word. It’s a blog, which means it opinionated and colourful. Not a great argument, Mark.

One of the reasons it’s unfortunate is that I think Cuban has a pretty good argument to make that Sharesleuth is journalism — albeit a very rigid and narrowly-defined version. In fact, it would probably be in everyone’s best interests if he didn’t call it journalism at all. It’s more like a well-researched report by a boutique brokerage firm (there’s a Canadian oilpatch firm that specializes in such reports). Is that journalism? Not really — but it’s darn close, regardless of the motives of its “publisher.” Some more discussion here by Ben Silverman of FindProfit.

I’ve been meaning to write about a recent post by PR blogger Steve Rubel entitled “reinventing the media interview,” and a friend’s e-mail this morning jogged my memory and reminded me that I hadn’t done so yet. His e-mail also mentioned a response to Steve’s post by British journalist Ian Delaney, who blogs at Two Point Ouch and is apparently writing a book on this whole Web 2.0 thingamajig we’re all wandering around in.

Steve described how bloggers such as billionaire Mark Cuban and Web-programming guru Dave Winer are trying to reinvent the media interview — in Mark’s case, by only doing interviews via e-mail so that he can run the transcripts on his blog if necessary (something Mark’s nemesis Patrick Byrne of Overstock has also done, ironically enough), and in Dave’s case answering questions on his blog so that everyone has access to the answers. Steve (who works for the Edelman public relations agency) says in his post that “there is lots of room to innovate here” and that he wants to “open this entire process up.”

I don’t know Ian Delaney, but I get the feeling that he would like the process to stay exactly the way it is, thank you very much. He says the kind of thing Steve is advocating would be bad, because it would lead to weaker published interviews, long delays between question and answer, and “over-polished and cloned responses” from PR types. He also suggests that allowing interviewees to “open up” the traditional process would subvert one of the goals of certain media interviews, which is to put CEOs on the spot.

Maybe it’s all the relaxation time I’ve had on vacation, but I can see the merits of both arguments, and I don’t necessarily think it’s an either/or kind of question. If you’re a CEO like Mark who feels that you get subjected to drive-by interviews that misrepresent your views, then I think doing interviews by e-mail makes perfect sense — but it only works if you are as direct (and fast) as Mark is, which is quite rare in a CEO. Likewise, I can see why Dave wants to respond on his blog — because he sees the value in having his thoughts become part of the blogosphere record (such as it is).

I sympathize with Ian’s concern about how “reinventing the interview” might affect the hard-hitting Q&A with the CEO of a chemical company, but I would also argue that this kind of interview is hardly a daily event. Not only that, but I don’t think we’re in danger of being swamped by blogging CEOs, regardless of how persuasive Steve might be. And having spent days preparing for canned, smoke-and-mirrors CEO interviews that reveal little and yet are so momentous they have to be written about, I would kill for a fast e-mail chat with someone like Mark.

A little more openness on both sides would probably make things a whole lot more interesting for everyone. There are competitive issues as well to consider, however, as my friend — and competitor — Mark Evans points out.