The YouTube story is indeed a fascinating one. I’m still getting my head around it, but it does certainly go to show how many great ideas, relatively simple in concept, are still waiting to be actualized on the web – and the fact there are many more millionaires yet to be made.

We can all find inspiration in that!

I’m an admirer of YouTube; as much as for their success (perhaps more) as for their service. It doesn’t really matter what happens to YouTube from this point onwards, it was the getting to this point which is truly amazing and a story which will be referred to by many in the industry for years to come.

I only started using YouTube a few months ago – to watch The Evolution of Dance which had received a great deal of press around March this year. At the time of writing this, the clip has been viewed nearly 40 million times.

I sniffed around a little more after viewing the clip and was immediately blown away that just about *any* music video from my misspent youth was available. I tried obscure one-hit wonders from the 80′s.. they were all there. Ah, the nostalgia.

The other point that impressed me was that the service just worked – so easy to use, excellent streaming. Rumor has it that the company currently pays between 1 – 2 million dollars a month in bandwidth bills.

The short evolution of YouTube

YouTube was launched early in 2005 in the same way that most great tech related companies seem to be – a garage and no real cash to speak of (Google, Microsoft and eBay have “garage” type roots). The founders were Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim – all of whom met via their employment at PayPal. As far as I know, none of them are over the age of 30.

The story is that one night they became frustrated with trying to email a video clip. They then fleshed out the infrastructure for their video sharing platform within a couple of hours.

It’s a classic scenario of identifying a problem from the perspective of a consumer and then addressing a need.

The domain name was registered on the 14th of February 2005 and the site was open to the public by May. It was an instant hit; and word of mouth took over which fuelled the initial growth.

Towards the end of 2005, YouTube was “officially” launched after securing funding from Sequoia Capital to the tune of 3.5 million dollars. Sequoia Capital sunk in another 8 million clams in April 2006. The thought of outside investors can be rather scary, but for some businesses, growing too fast can be equally as deadly as growing too slow. If YouTube hadn’t chased the investor cash, their servers would have bogged down, new features couldn’t have been added and users would have quickly gravitated to some of the other services that were rapidly springing up.

As for revenue during this early period – there was none to speak of. This was starting to look rather like a dotcom bubble biz from the late 90′s/early 2000.

The very interesting thing here is that even with all the investment cash, very little was put into promoting YouTube; all the money went into infrastructure and responding to user requests for features. That’s one major difference to many of the dotcom bubble companies who spent up big on ads.

YouTube played it very smart by making it easy for their users to do the promotion for them. It was viral marketing at its best; from simple ideas such has having short links to videos (easy to email) and tell-a-friend functions, to allowing videos to easily be embedded in profiles of other social networking services; with YouTube branding of course. Their voting system also helped to create a sense of community as did profile pages for users.

The ensuing buzz and videos such as The Evolution of Dance then caught the attention of the press and spurred on even more activity.

YouTube and copyright

It wasn’t always a bed of roses during their growth; the issue of copyright has dogged the company on many occasions and probably will do so for some time to come. While I’m sure that the user created original videos has played a substantial role in their success, I do believe that perhaps it was the copyrighted content being so easily accessible that may have been the *major* factor of their rocket ride.

In my case, the Evolution of Dance got me there, but it was the 80′s music videos that kept me hanging around, reinforcing my awareness and recall of the word “YouTube”.

In terms of copyrighted content; how have they survived? Well, they’ve been very clever in utilizing the very grey area of the DMCA Safe Harbor Provisions; which provides protection to service providers from liability for the activities of its users. As they were seen in the eyes of the law to fall into that category; they’ve been somewhat protected .. up until now anyway; there’s still a few law suits kicking around.

But even on that point, they’ve been very smart. Instead of trying to be crusaders and digging their heels in; which has been the undoing of other services, they have extended an olive branch to some copyright owners in the form of revenue share partnerships which has seen some content effectively becoming licensed.

The way that works with music videos is YouTube has software in place which can identify soundtracks in videos posted posted by its users; the copyright owner then gets a slice of any advertising revenue run alongside the video.

These partnerships also helped pave the way for what was about to happen next.

YouTube strikes it big

The payoff for the YouTube founders ideas and clever maneuvering occurred on October 9 when Google, Inc., acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google’s stock. With Google now in the arena, any lawsuits are most likely to become background noise.

From $0 to $1.65 billion in under two years – my hat is well and truly off to these guys just for that achievement. They played the game well.

They have a very inspirational story.

While inheriting a billion dollars is still the easiest way to land on our list of the world’s wealthiest, it certainly isn’t the most common. Almost two-thirds of the world’s 946 billionaires made their fortunes from scratch, relying on grit and determination, and not good genes.

Fifty of these self-made tycoons are college or high school dropouts. The most famous billionaire dropout is Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who finally got his honorary degree from Harvard University in June, 30 years after quitting the prestigious school to sell software. “I did the best of everyone who failed,” joked the world’s richest man in his official graduation address. With failure like that, who needs success?

Other billionaires, such as media maven Oprah Winfrey, made their fortunes against far greater odds. Born in rural Mississippi, she spent her early years living in poverty on her grandmother’s farm. Wanting a way out, she moved to Wisconsin to be with her mother, but was sexually molested by her male relatives. At age 14, she reportedly gave birth to a premature baby who died. Only after moving to Nashville to be with her father did her luck finally start to turn.

In honor of the world’s self-made billionaires, we’re recounting 10 of our favorite real-life Horatio Alger tales.
The stories of these bootstrapping billionaires are as diverse as the 10 individuals themselves. They range in age from 40 to 91, hail from diverse industries such as fashion and oil, and live in five different countries. Russia’s richest man, Roman Abramovich, was an orphan. Apple’s iconic Steve Jobs was adopted. Jobs dropped out of Reed College when he couldn’t pay the tuition; his net worth today could support nearly 40,000 students at Reed for four years. Three others, including Ralph Lauren, are also college dropouts.

Another five are high school or grade school dropouts, proving that street smarts can often trump book smarts. The U.K.’s publishing magnate Richard Desmond, for instance, quit high school when he realized he could make more money working in the cloakroom of a club; at age 16, he borrowed his older brother’s suit to get a sales job. He’s been selling ever since, peddling music, porn and celebrity titles including OK! magazine.

Asia’s richest man, Li Ka-shing dropped out of school at age 15, after his father died, to work in a factory. Kirk Kerkorian quit during the eighth grade to take up boxing. He later flew airplanes on daredevil missions across the Atlantic during World War II, before sinking his money into his own airline and reinvesting profits in Las Vegas.

Sin City has also been good to Sheldon Adelson. The son of a Boston cabdriver borrowed $200 at age 12 to start selling newspapers; he later held stints as a mortgage broker, investment advisor and financial consultant. The high school dropout and Broadway enthusiast studied voice in his teens, but it was another kind of stage that called him – trade shows, where he made his first fortune.

Adelson later gambled on casinos in Las Vegas, Macau and Singapore, and took his Las Vegas Sands (nyse: LVS) public in December 2004. Says Adelson, “I loved being the outsider.”

Good luck and good timing is also helpful when creating vast fortunes from scratch. James Cayne, for instance, moved to New York to play bridge full-time; he was spotted by Wall Street legend Alan “Ace” Greenberg, who was impressed by Cayne’s card skills and hired him to be a stockbroker at his firm Bear Stearns (nyse: BSC). Cayne is now chairman.

The world’s wealthiest novelist, J.K. Rowling, was on welfare raising her little girl when her agent called to tell her that Bloomsbury would publish her book about an adolescent wizard named Harry Potter.

One thing is for sure: There is no lack of chutzpah among our rags to riches bunch.

Notorious Ponzi scammer Bernie Madoff has been sentenced to the maximum 150 years in prison for the $65 billion fraud that swindled his many devastated victims.

Judge Denny Chin said the sentence was a symbolic one for a crime that showed “extraordinary evil” and “took a staggering human toll.”

Madoff, addressing the court in a dark suit, white shirt and black tie for about six minutes, said that when he started the scam, he thought he’d be able to “work my way out.” He said he lives in a tormented state and expressed regret of leaving a “legacy of shame” to his family and grandchildren.”

He maintained that he acted alone, saying, “How do you excuse lying to brother and sons? How do you excuse lying and deceiving a wife who stood by you for 50 years and still stands by you? There is no excuse for that and I don’t ask for forgiveness.”

He then faced his victims in court and said, “I’m sorry.”

When the sentence was read, the courtroom broke out in applause.

Ruth Madoff Releases Statement

Through her attorney, Ruth Madoff released a written statement after the sentencing expressing her shock and feeling of betrayal of her husband’s crime, saying, “The man who committed this horrible fraud is not the man whom I have known for all these years.”

She said that since the fraud was revealed in December, she has thought “first, that so many people who trusted [Madoff] would be ruined financially and emotionally, and second, that my life with the man I have known for over 50 years was over.”

Outside the U.S. District Court in lower Manhattan, there was a steady flow of Madoff victims as they arrived at the courthouse, and many stopped to speak to the media to describe their losses before hearing the fate of the man who swindled them.

Madoff’s attorney Ira Sorkin arrived and immediately entered the courthouse without making any statements.

Madoff Victims Speak: ‘He ‘Shattered My Dreams’

At today’s hearing, nine victims of Madoff’s Ponzi scheme addressed the courtroom, describing how they had been wiped out both financially and emotionally. They represented the range of Madoff’s thousands of victims: working class, middle class, affluent, young and old.

Dominic Ambrosino said the fraud cost him his freedom, forcing him to move from his house to a mobile home and survive on nothing more than a pension. Madoff spending his days in jail, Ambrosino said, are comparable to the imprisonment in his own life.

As to where Madoff serves out his years, victim Carla Henderson said Madoff does not deserve to spend his days in “a federal country club.”

Another victim, Sharon Lisshour, was very emotional as she addressed the court, describing the fraud as a nightmare that she keeps thinking she’ll wake up from, but never does. “He killed my spirit and shattered my dreams,” Lisshour said of Madoff, adding that she thinks he should spend the rest of his life in prison.

“This jail should become his coffin,” said 33-year-old victim Michael Schwart, who had been investing with Madoff since he was a teen. Breaking down on the stand, Schwartz said the money he had invested with Madoff was supposed to support his disabled brother. Now, after losing his job, Schwartz said he has nothing.

Madoff Speaks at Sentencing

Madoff entered the courtroom minutes before the hearing began with his head held low. As his victims spoke, he looked down at his hands the entire time, never once meeting their stares.

Madoff said his wife Ruth cries herself to sleep every night “thinking of the pain I caused.”

Before reading his sentencing, Judge Chinn said that none of Madoff’s friends or family sent letters attesting to his character.

The judge said Madoff should be designated to an “appropriate facility” in the northeast region. He told Madoff he had the right to appeal but must do so within 10 days. The court would appoint him a lawyer, the judge said, if he could not afford one.

Advocacy Groups Promote Causes Outside Madoff Sentencing

Outside the courthouse, advocacy groups such as the Madoff Survivors and Victims Coalition promoted their causes. The Coalition is calling on Congress to develop legislation that addresses losses due to fraud, for Bankruptcy Court to recover and quickly distribute assets to investors and for the IRS to extend the number of years for filing amended taxes as a result of fraud.

Self-described civil rights activist and comedian Randy Credico called for clemency for Madoff outside the courthouse, passing out flyers that read “Clemency for the Ponzi One.” Credico said Madoff should not be sent to prison because he is a first time non-violent offender.

Also handed out outside was the “Bernie Madoff Edition” of Andy Borowitz’s book, “Who Moved My Soap? The CEO’s Guide to Surviving in Prison.” The cover featured a picture of Madoff with bars superimposed over his face and proclamations that the book is “made from 100% shredded paper,” “compact design survives most strip searches” and “can also be used as a weapon!”

Bernie Madoff, a former chairman of the NASDAQ stock market, has been arrested and charged with running a multi-billion dollar hedge fund swindle in New York.

Mr Madoff is alleged to have operated the scheme through his hedge fund business, which was separate from his better-known market-making business, Bernard L. Madoff Investment Securities (BMIS).

Mr Madoff told senior employees of his firm on Wednesday that “it’s all just one big lie” and that he was “finished”, according to a criminal complaint filed on Thursday night by the US Attorney’s office and the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI).

He allegedly went on to say that the business was “a giant Ponzi scheme” – a reference to Charles Ponzi, one of the greatest swindlers in US history – and estimated that the scheme had lost investors $50bn over many years – which would make the hedge fund one of the biggest frauds in history.

“There is no innocent explanation,” Mr Madoff said, according to the criminal complaint. He told the agents that it was all his fault, and that he “paid investors with money that wasn’t there”, according to the complaint.

He allegedly told his employees that he had, for years, been paying returns to certain investors out of the cash received from other investors.

Mr Madoff, 70, was charged with a single count of securities fraud and faces up to 20 years in prison and a fine of up to $5m if found guilty.

The criminal complaint was accompanied by a separate civil lawsuit filed by the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which accuses Mr Madoff of defrauding clients of his firm and seeks emergency relief for the victims.

“Our complaint alleges a stunning fraud – both in terms of scope and duration. We are moving quickly and decisively to stop the scheme and protect the remaining assets for investors,” said Scott Friestad, the SEC’s deputy enforcer.

The complaint details that as of Jan 7, 2008, Madoff’s investment advisory business had assets of $17.1bn, serving up to 25 clients.

Although Mr Madoff is thought to have few direct British links, he did open a London office in 1983, with Madoff Securities International becoming one of the first American members of the London Stock Exchange.

Stephen Raven, chief executive of Madoff Securities International said: “We only became aware overnight of the news relating to our Chairman, Bernard Madoff. Our business in London is not in any way part of Bernard L Madoff Investment Securities LLC. His major shareholding in our firm is a personal investment. Our business activities are not involved in any way with the US asset management company with which the reported allegations appear to be concerned. We do not have any further information beyond what is already in the public domain.”

In 2000, his market-making business BMIS partnered with Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch to the form the new Primex Trading platform, one of the early rival electronic exchanges to the main bourses which eventually fell by the wayside following a partnership with NASDAQ.

BMIS is also credited with ending the old practice of quoting New York Stock Exchange-listed securities in eighths of a dollar in 1997, instead listing them in sixteenths.

Mr Madoff began BMIS with just $5,000 of savings from jobs lifeguarding at Rockaway Beach and installing sprinkler systems.

The firm grew to become a leading market maker, with brother Peter, nephew Charles, niece Shana, and sons Mark and Andrew all involved in the business at some stage in recent years.

His firm’s website claims that BMIS ranks among the top one per cent of US securities firms, and states that “clients know Bernard Madoff has a personal interest in maintaining… high ethical standards.”

Mr Madoff’s lawyer, Dan Horwitz, called his client “a person of integrity” and said he intends to fight the charge. “We will fight to get through this unfortunate set of events.” His client was released on a $10m bond secured by his New York apartment.

I’d steer clear of sites like “How I earn $50,000 per month” because the way they’re probably making it is from selling these “ideas”!

There’s no quick and easy way to make money, but if you’re willing to put in time and effort there are plenty of opportunities. You have to be patient though.

What do you need the money for? How much do you need? Are you after income or a lump sum? What is your timeframe for making the amount of money you need? We can all probably help more if you have the answers to these questions.

Don’t buy into any of these courses!! The only person who will get rich is the person selling them!

I feel for you with your current situation…not easy to start again from scratch. But you must not panic and jump into something – there’s an old chinese proverb:

“The shortest route is to take the longest route first”

Basically, short cuts often take you the wrong way and end up taking longer.

Do you get my theme here? no quick and easy way just ask Bernie Madoff’s investors, read the articles.

There are many different options for making money online. Some of the ideas I’m going to show you here you may have already thought about but there are others that might not have crossed your mind.

There are many different options for making money online. Some of the ideas I’m going to show you here you may have already thought about but there are others that might not have crossed your mind.

1. Adwords. If you have a good product, whether it is your own or you are an affiliate for it, you can build an effective PPC campaign. This is perhaps the fastest way of raising cash, though it requires some up-front costs.

2. Sell other people’s products. You can become an affiliate and sell information products for them and earn a good commission, sometimes up to 75% of the price of the product. All you have to do is to promote the product by means of writing and submitting articles to article directories and watching the sales flood in.

3. Proofreading. If you are good at grammar and spelling there are many marketers looking for good proofreaders. This could be for their sales copy, book, website articles etc. Once they have done all the hard work of developing their product they will often outsource the task of proofreading. You can make money by checking their articles or books for them.

4. Freelancing. You can get paid for writing online if you have a talent for writing. It’s a simple matter of bidding for projects at sites such as elance.com where you can be hired to write a few articles or even a complete book. As you get more positive feedback you can charge more for your services.

5. If you have good computer skills offer a service for putting up and/or maintaining websites , designing websites, book covers etc. If you join forums you can offer your services and also look to see what other people are looking for.

6. Start a blog on a topic that interests you and then look for products to recommend. Write reviews on different products that relate to your topic. You will find hundreds of products to write reviews about at Clickbank. You can sign up for free as an affiliate and get a percentage of each sale you make with your reviews. Many people are using this money making idea and making a small fortune from it.

The fastest way to make money is to actually take action! The best way to learn is to start using just one of the ideas above, you may make mistakes at first but you will learn fast from your mistakes. Work on something and get better at it – effort will lead to pay-off.

It’s up to you as to how you want to use these money making ideas. The more you use, the more you make. It’s as simple as that.

7. When you have made money by using one of these ideas write a report or e-book on what you did and how you did it and make even more money by selling it!!

8. Online selling you can use all2go.com.au to sell your unwanted items, sell on behalf of friends. Starting this way is good for you to make enough money to use as capital for your next venture. This site has worked well for me and it is free to list and sell.