Week 10: Lightweights and Scalables

Our final Web 2.0 pattern is Lightweight Models and Cost-Effective Scalability.  A sort of amalgamation of all previous patterns, Lightweight Models and Cost-Effective Scalability means cheap, re-usable, easy to upgrade web-based solutions or services.  The service must be cheap to implement and easy to access (lightweight) and must be easy to modify and upgrade in the future (cost-effective scalability).  The ultimate goal is to get the products released sooner and cheaper, without sacrificing future growth or improvement.  We can start making money as soon as possible, start getting feedback as soon as possible, and begin upgrading and fixing the service after release.

This pattern is represented in almost all Web 2.0 applications.  It therefore makes it very difficult to pick one example to serve as a better example than any other.  So for the third and final time, we're going to talk about YouTube.

YouTube is a framework: a bare bones service that allows users to share, search, and view, and monetize their own content.  The greatest cost the YouTube has to bear is the cost of the servers required to store all that video, but YouTube can make that all back (and much more) simply by displaying advertisements on video pages.

YouTube doesn't have to pay for any of the actual content.  The cost of producing videos is born by the content creators.  YouTube's own marketing was almost entirely viral, and didn't cost YouTube a cent.  People started using it and telling each other about how great it was.

So, YouTube simply hosts content.  It doesn't pay for content, it doesn't pay for marketing, and it makes a boatload of cash with advertisements.