Saturday, December 30, 2006
Guba's Dark Side: Where's the Money Really Coming From?
The video sharing wars are over, and YouTube has won. At least, that's what you'd think given the executive shakeup at a couple of its competitors. Revver's co-founders left last week, and this week Guba CEO Tom McInerney decided to take his leave as well. In a candid interview, he explained his view that there were no more billion dollar deals coming down the pipeline with YouTube dominating more than half of the video sharing market. Furthermore, with no prospects of a pot of gold at the end of the line, the smart executive should be looking for a quick exit.
Let's take a closer look at Guba. Originally targeting the market for easy downloading of newsgroup binaries, Guba, or Gigantic Usenet Binaries Archive, still has traces of its newsgroup past if you browse its site carefully. You might consider this their gray side.
How do they make money? It looks like some of their revenue is coming from a deal cut with Sony Pictures and Warner Bros. Entertainment a while back that allows Guba to offer movies like Superman Returns and TV shows like Friends to users for an iTunes-like fee of 99 and 49 cents, respectively. Their light side.
But that's not all. Guba also runs an adult video site sans sharing called Skin Video (link NSFW
and may not be suitable for all readers). You'll notice the Guba connection isn't prominently featured although the website design is eerily familiar. For a fee of $14.95 per month, you can get access to Skin Video's regularly updated video offerings. I'm betting this is where the real money is coming from since adult content is the only consistent Internet moneymaker. You might call it their dark side.
Looking at the Alexa traffic stats, we can see that skinvideo.com has consistently performed better than guba.com although they have been converging in the last month. Importantly though, Skin Video viewers have to pay for access while Guba viewers can browse a large array of video offerings for free. It's no trick to tell which site is making more money overall or on a per pageview basis.
So, what do you do when your adult video site is your main revenue center? With no significant mainstream audience, you can't really sell yourself to a big media company so billion dollar paydays are out. With dreams of a YouTube-like acquisition out the window, Tom was wise to get out before Guba undergoes another transformation into just another porn site.
Clarification: My point is that most, if not all, bloggers have written about Guba as if it were a video sharing site like YouTube or Metacafe when it's very likely that most of its revenues come from its skinvideo.com domain.
Let's take a closer look at Guba. Originally targeting the market for easy downloading of newsgroup binaries, Guba, or Gigantic Usenet Binaries Archive, still has traces of its newsgroup past if you browse its site carefully. You might consider this their gray side.How do they make money? It looks like some of their revenue is coming from a deal cut with Sony Pictures and Warner Bros. Entertainment a while back that allows Guba to offer movies like Superman Returns and TV shows like Friends to users for an iTunes-like fee of 99 and 49 cents, respectively. Their light side.
But that's not all. Guba also runs an adult video site sans sharing called Skin Video (link NSFW
and may not be suitable for all readers). You'll notice the Guba connection isn't prominently featured although the website design is eerily familiar. For a fee of $14.95 per month, you can get access to Skin Video's regularly updated video offerings. I'm betting this is where the real money is coming from since adult content is the only consistent Internet moneymaker. You might call it their dark side.Looking at the Alexa traffic stats, we can see that skinvideo.com has consistently performed better than guba.com although they have been converging in the last month. Importantly though, Skin Video viewers have to pay for access while Guba viewers can browse a large array of video offerings for free. It's no trick to tell which site is making more money overall or on a per pageview basis.
So, what do you do when your adult video site is your main revenue center? With no significant mainstream audience, you can't really sell yourself to a big media company so billion dollar paydays are out. With dreams of a YouTube-like acquisition out the window, Tom was wise to get out before Guba undergoes another transformation into just another porn site.Clarification: My point is that most, if not all, bloggers have written about Guba as if it were a video sharing site like YouTube or Metacafe when it's very likely that most of its revenues come from its skinvideo.com domain.
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