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Google in Talks to Buy YouTube

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the dogs-and-cats-living-together-mass-hysteria dept.

tessaiga writes "The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google is in talks to buy YouTube for about $1.6 billion. YouTube users watch more that 100 million videos daily, and the site's market share tops that of similar services offered by Google and other popular Web sites. This comes after a story earlier this morning that co-founder Sergey Brin is pushing for Google to cut back on the volume of products being offered, complaining that 'I was getting lost in the sheer volume of the products we were releasing'. Guess Google Video is one of the products making the approved shortlist."

6 of 157 comments (clear)

  1. I don't understand why they need to. by celardore · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Surely they'd only be buying the YouTube name. Google has way more hardware, and an already succesful video product out there. Maybe they are trying to eliminate the competition, and get the ad revenue all for themselves. Is YouTube really worth that much to them though?

  2. Yeah... by CheeseburgerBrown · · Score: 5, Insightful

    ...it's amazing how not sucking works wonders for the way people interpret your actions and qualify the possible repercussions.

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    1. Re:Yeah... by TheRaven64 · · Score: 5, Insightful
      MS-DOS didn't suck too badly compared to CP/M.

      Xenix didn't such compared to other UNIXes.

      OS/2 didn't suck, and neither did Windows NT next to desktop UNIX or DR-DOS+GEM

      Microsoft Word 2 didn't suck next to any of its competition.

      Microsoft have released more products that don't suck than Google (although, to be fair, I suspect most of us have been forced to use more of the ones that do suck). Google search has gone downhill a lot in recent months; I'm frequently finding searches fail to return any useful information, or if they do it's buried on page 3-4 of the results. Google is a young company, and they haven't had the time to screw up as badly as MS yet.

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  3. Re:But they couldn't solve our puzzles! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Why is this 'funny'? 'Insightful' is more like it. Youtube is a piece of technological crap, yet it meets a social need. Much like MySpace. And both are wildly popular. Yet Slashdot persists in its belief that programming is the center of the universe.

  4. Am i the only one who thinks this makes sense? by sam991 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Google video may be the technically superior service, but it is almost completely lacking in social interaction. Youtube encourages you to have a vlog, to post video responses etc. Google video (at least from the standpoint of a Youtube user) is a little cold.

    Google may well have the hardware, but they've a lot to learn about what makes a site popular. Myspace has to be one of the ugliest sites around yet its popularity is ever soaring because it is social. Google video just is not.

    At the end of the day, Youtube is synonymous with the online video hosting/sharing community and that is what Google are paying £850 million for. That and the ability to integrate with existing Google products (Google calendar & vlog combined? That's some powerful stuff right there.)

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  5. Re:The new name. by Rob+T+Firefly · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Lol. Goo in my first language means "shit". So how would you like to view shittube?

    I already have a television, thanks.

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