phenomenon,
Though YouTube is free, there haven’t been serious attempts to monetize it. It’s time for a reality check. Streaming video on the Internet en masse costs money, and it’s estimated that YouTube is dropping about $1.5 million a month just to operate. That will double and triple as more people discover it. These losses can’t go on forever.
But i don’t think web 2.0 is going to be the second dot com bubble. As Paul Graham said,
The reason this won’t turn into a second Bubble is that the IPO market is gone. Venture investors are driven by exit strategies. The reason they were funding all those laughable startups during the late 90s was that they hoped to sell them to gullible retail investors; they hoped to be laughing all the way to the bank. Now that route is closed. Now the default exit strategy is to get bought, and acquirers are less prone to irrational exuberance than IPO investors. The closest you’ll get to Bubble valuations is Rupert Murdoch paying $580 million for Myspace. That’s only off by a factor of 10 or so.