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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.
a series of 'tubes?
SO glad that YouTube will now be sheltered by "the good guys" ... assuming they stay the good guys *cautious glance over shoulder*
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.
The Bubble is back! Bubble 2.0, but a bubble nonetheless.
Invexi - a Phoenix, AZ based web design and web development company.
Hey google, Thats 24 million dollars each isn't it? I'm a one man company, but you can buy my company (www.positech.co.uk) for just $15 million.
Give me a call, or just drop me an email guys. That figure is negotiable too.
DRM-free indie games for the PC and Mac: Positech Games
Even though they say "YouTube will retain its distinct brand identity" I wonder how much integration they will eventually do with Google Video. Will YouTube videos be search-able on Google Video, for example? Google is usually good at not integrating just for the sake of integrating. For example, Google Analytics still uses a Flash based map instead of the Google Maps API.
Bradley Holt
Build a man a fire and he'll be warm for an hour. Set him on fire and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
I know some people won't get why they did this, or how Google will make money from YouTube. I will explain:
First, Google makes money through advertisement. Currently simple text banner ads. But a quick look at other sites will show you a growing interest in video ads. YouTube has a lot of visitors, and if Google plays this correctly they can make more advertisement dollars.
Secondly, YouTube signed some nice contracts with the likes of CBS and two music labels.
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.
Surprisingly, I found Google Video's search capablities lacking compared to YouTube's. Google Video searches exactly what you're looking for, with no variations. YouTube is a little bit smarter, it can perform keyword branching, which surprisingly works very well for video searches. (When I'm searching for boobies, I don't care if it's one or many boobies they're showing.)
tubes sound better than transistors?
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..
Does this mean that YouTube will now go into Beta status?
Too, I wonder how google will integrate the two.
Keep in mind that Google is not paying dollars -- they are trading Google stock for YouTube stock. So even though $1.65b is a scary number, what you should be asking yourself is not whether YT is worth $1.65b, but whether it is worth 1.25% of Google.
Well, remember, this is a STOCK ONLY deal. There is no cash exchanged. So, if you're angry, you should be angry at the dilution of the stock. But, you can't be angry at what "they could have bought with that money." To Google at this point in their history, the deal was practically free.
You've seen that Simpson's where Bart works for a dotcom, right? You know, how the stock is worth toilet paper? That's somewhat close to the view from the inside when making deals using stock. It's like free money to them.
Beware of geeks bearing formulas.
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.
Although I disagree with this long term, what most people haven't realized is that Google got YouTube for free. On news they might buy last week, their stock rose ~2%. It rose even more today with more news and will probably raise a bit more tomorrow. So, 1.65 billion in stock was given away which is something like 1.5% of the company. If they just increased the companies worth by 5%, did they not just make a profit buy "buying" this company?
Long term it might not turn out that way, but annually this is great.
"If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer
That's funny, I had a quick discussion with my co-workers too, and they were of the mind TEN MINUTES AGO that Google needs the following:
c id=16357565c id=16357445
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..
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Are you a script? If so you should be changed to reply coherently to replies in your thread, that would be more entertaining. Simply copying posts is a bit dull don't you think?
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=199747&
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=199747&
A webcast of the conference call can be found at http://investor.google.com/webcast.html in real player and windows media player format. The good part is a few minutes in when they start taking questions.
Most of it is about how each (youtube and google) will contribute to each other. They also talk a bit about financials; why google used stocks instead of cash, what youtube's revenue is, etc. Long webcast, but informative.
"Google video will not go away, ever." - direct quote from the webcast. The only integration the talk about it about google search in youtube but do say they plan to integrate more.
The only reason anybody likes YouTube is because it's full of blatantly illegal content. YouTube is the new Napster. By buying Youtube, Google has put themselves into a position where they only have two options and both are "evil" from someone's perspective. They can continue hosting copyrighted material without permission and brazenly break the law, thus being "evil" to the coypright holders. Or they can stop hosting such content and effectively destroy the community that has built up around YouTube, thus being "evil" to Joe Random Netizen.
How does Google's "don't be evil" mantra work if they allow themselves to become involved in situations where one man's evil is another man's good?
Unless they have some secret plan for Youtube now that they've bought it that is so deviously brilliant I can't even conceive of what it might be, this really looks like a no-win situation for Google.
HAVE! It's HAVE, fucktard. How is it possible that you make THREE mistakes with TWO words??
OK, I'm seeing a lot of posts calling this acquisition "stupid" and i'm seeing the word "bubble" a lot. Now, many of these posters may know exactly what they are talking about, they may be far more informed about the business prospects of both companies than I am.
But if you just say "this is stupid" without any analysis of the future earnings of these businesses, you are adding nothing to the discussion.
Consider the following: Google is paying approx. 3.85 million shares of Google for YouTube. What is the value of those shares? Probably less than you think. What kind of competitive advantage does google have to justify such a high P/E ratio? They have the smartest technical people in the valley, and a great culture, those have to be worth something. But I'd argue that thy aren't worth $430 a share. What happens to google.com's traffic once people start using MSN search by default in the IE7 search box? Well, I can't tell you exactly what will happen, but I've got a decent guess. It'll PROBABLY GO DOWN, at least the growth rate. Does this sound like a company that is worth 62 times earnings ($130b by market value)?
I'd argue that if there's a bubble here, it's probably in the price of Google, not the price of YouTube. These things are hard to predict because you don't know exactly how the technology, and the underlying social dynamics of the users, will play out. And yes, the legal issues are thorny and I don't feel qualified to analyze those (though I'm sure Google's lawyers are more than qualified to). But i'd argue that Google ought to be making MORE acquisitons with its stock, not fewer.
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
I was actually searching for these.
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.
That's some Lanley-Institute-of-Monorail-Conducting-level definition:
MONO = ONE
RAIL = RAIL
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Slashdot is outsourcing its +5 Funny to India now?
The latest Slashdot meme.
The languages you name are not a result of "'mistakes' in Latin." What we know as Spanish, for example, is certainly heavily influenced by Latin. But it is not a simple derivative of Latin that appeared because people couldn't remember their declensions. Rather, Latin mixed with existing indigenous languages (which were in turn based on mixes of other, earlier languages such as Celtic). Then there was the small matter of Arabic-speaking Moors ruling much of Spain for a time, leaving behind an Arabic influence that persisted even after the speakers of the more Latin-influenced language drove the Moors out.
The histories of modern languages are actually rather interesting reading. They are more complex than you might think.
I think foreign occupations and fluid borders have contributed vastly more lasting change to languages over time than oft-repeated mistakes have, though you can certainly point to plenty of examples of the latter. For example, using "they" as a gender-neutral pronoun in English is becoming more and more accepted over time. A hundred years from now it may well be universally considered completely correct in formal written English. On the other hand, "their" and "they're" and "there" are still not interchangeable despite the best mistake-making efforts of generations of students.
Finally, if you really believe that poorly-spelled, ungrammatical writing is just fine, start learning a foreign language. Preferably one that's very distant from your native language. Then visit that language's equivalent of Slashdot and I guarantee you will deeply appreciate the people who take the time to proofread their messages. Poor grammar and spelling are not much of a problem for native speakers, but they can be huge obstacles to understanding for non-native speakers.
Quoting from one of many sources this morning:
"As its negotiations with Google neared a conclusion, YouTube announced partnerships with Universal Music Group, CBS Corporation and Sony BMG Music Entertainment.
Those alliances followed a similar arrangement announced last month with Warner Music Group"
So the copyright aspect is frankly a moot point, Google is also promising to share the proceeds of any future revenue with video owners, that will fence off most other challenges.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.