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Google Buys YouTube for $1.65 Billion
Over 30 readers wrote about Google's purchase of YouTube today for $1.65 Billion, as rumored last week. The all-stock transaction is the single largest purchase in the company's 8-year history. The move follows on the heels of Google's convincing Sony and Warner Music to put music videos online for free. Reportedly, YouTube will retain its brand and all its 67 employees, including co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.
will video.google.com still exist as it is I wonder?
nothing
The bubble will burst on this purchase. There's too much copyright infringement going on @ Youtube.
hiphop-universe.com
This is so ungoogle. Google builds, not buys. Google indexes, not serves. Google already had a video service.
Google is jumping the shark.
True, Warner has embraced it's content for ad revenue, but I'm sure Youtube was treading on a thin edge, and would've had their a55es sued sooner or later.
This will just expedite the inevitable, and I expect Google to quickly unpublish most (C) content to save their a55es. That'll probably reduce it to what Google Videos is right now, fun, but with very limited content.
Goodbye, Youtube, it was a good run while it lasted.
Deep Pockets (TM) invite lawsuits ~GillBates (2006)
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I keep seeing all these comments about "copyright violations" on youtube... is a 5 minute daily show clip a copyright violation? Is there such a thing as fair use? Does youtube (now google) have some sort of common carrier for video defense they could claim?
I'd like to see some serious commentary on this, and not just the assumption that youtube voilates copyright. I spend probably and hour a week watching stuff on youtube, and I'm sure over 95% of what I see does NOT violate any copyrights.
1.65 you say? Why keep working -- that's just shy of 25 million dollars in stock per employee. I'd cut and run. Wouldn't you?
Why stick with a company that has a potentially uncertain future, when you can go and start doing whatever you want (founding various cool companies that might be even better), or simply go do charity work.
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
Is it because Google fumbled around trying to implement some sort of open-standards solution while YouTube built up a userbase with the corporate controlled but much more user friendly Flash format? (Egad, it even uses patented video codecs that Macromedia licensed!)
That's at least part of the answer.
Ouch Slashdot. $1.65 Billion. Ouch.
Some of us concluded that it was mostly going to be:
a. the users and more importantly
b. the usage pattern of these users
While google has been picking up little things here and there, essentially this is google's first real "social networking" site that they have purchased. I say it in quotes because youtube isn't really a social networking site, but there are certainly aspects of it that cannot be denied.
I say youtube lucked out and google really made a stupid purchase, it appears to me like it was an attrition attempt against the competition in internet space (yahoo? microsoft? myspace? - whoever they think their competition is atm, because I can't tell). I don't know.. I'm curious to see where this goes. Google definately wants to go into the multimedia distribution area, that's for sure. How they go about doing it, we'll have to see..
I mean ... seriously ... they didn't think they could wipe YouTube off the map for less than 1.6B?
Think of the advertising, software, and video servers they could have bought with that money.
If I were a google stockholder I'd be a) furious and b) selling. This really makes google look like they're losing their way.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
A recent BusinessWeek magazine article on Akamai Technologies, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts suggests they may actually be the content distribution network for Google. This is implied in the article:
9 /b4002094.htm?chan=tc&chan=technology_technology+i ndex+page_more+of+today's+top+stories
http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_3
It is highly likely that Akamai actually "owns" the internet content distribution backbone you describe.
The why is simple, youtube has the audience and google needs that audience. The next question is then 'why does google need a larger video audience'. The answer to that question is google is about to make a play on video ads (think adwords for video) and needs the majority of the internet video audience to claim the crown and solidify their dominance. Theres alot of money at stake in creating centralized video ad networks on an auction style model, and google is trying to bolster their legitimacy when they enter that race.
..because flash sucks and flash on linux is double plus icky-sucky. At least google vids give you the option of downloading in a non flash format. I have yet to be able to use youtube because it is flash only.
None of which explains why Google thinks YouTube is worth $1.65 Billion. There are a lot of big profitable high-tech companies that aren't worth that much. Selling text ads? They don't need to buy the company to do that. Selling video ads? They have their own video technology.
Not that it matters. Google can spend its money its money the way it wants, because it has more than it knows what to do with, and because its stockholders are shut out of corporate decision making. So it can buy companies that have no hope of contributing to the bottom line (Picassa, Outride, lots of blogging and social networking providers). It can hire lots of talented people. (And not so talented. Some of the people who've gone there recently are better at self-hype than actually making stuff.) And it can do this without any concern about making money.
Why is this bad? Because you have a lot of money, resources, and talent being used to subsidize what amounts to high-tech masturbation. Google gets bigger and bigger, and yet they release very few new products. And the products they do release stay in beta mode forever.
And please, don't try to tell me that "beta" is just a marketing or legal gimmick. Products like gmail, Google Groups, and Google Maps have lots of cool features, sure. But they're unpolished, inconsistently implemented, and very poorly documented. But most of all, they lack the boring little features that separate a toy project from a a real product.
Financially, Google is big success. But when it comes to pushing technological progress, they're a ship without a rudder. A very fancy ship, mind you, with free gourmet meals for the crew, and lots of conveniences and gadgets. But where is ship going. Nobody seems to know.
This purchase makes me wonder if this is just the beginning of big acquisitions for Google. While YouTube is not Google's first acquisition, up until now most have generally thought of Google as a company that prefers to build its own stuff. Indeed, Microsoft has often faced derision for being a company that has grown by buying up companies with innovative products/ideas. Personally, I don't think there's any evidence that Google has abandoned the build it ourselves attitude. Given the buzz and interest in YouTube, the acquisition may be more of a defensive buy than anything else to keep it out of the hands of Microsoft or Yahoo.
To the making of books there is no end, so let's get started
Build karma over time, then use mod points from a group of such accounts to mod up comments from another account that promotes a product or point of view, giving said post both credibility and, perhaps more importantly, increased views.
The end is nigh for social moderation without corresponding 'trust' networks.
Google has realised that the days of TV as we know it, are counted. The future is to search for specific movie content and get it, without having to keep an eye on dozens of channels, watch stupid adds or be informed with filtered news or tainted, politically biased comments or worse, propaganda payed by governments. It is an other consequence of globalisation. Everybody can become a content provider. The public finally can determine what it wants to see and what to toss away.
This is going to explode in the next years. Consumers are already able to build their own program and contribute to it. User feedback of millions of people is automatic and be valuable for content providers. The web allows to monitor exactly when and what people see and when to target which group with advertisement. It will be no problem to milk this new medium. It will also be fantastic for research of all kind. Companies, political parties etc which are able to harvest from a large amount of data and even pay for that. It will be the key for political power too.
It will a gold mine. 1.65 billion now is nothing. Lawsuits will be coming but this will come from the losers of the game and dropping those will not matter anyway. Let them protect their content so that nobody will watch it any more. Being "in the show" will be the main goal in this new game. It might even happen that companies pay for what one calls "copyright infringement" today They will finally realize that spreading the content is more important than to disappear in the oblivious.