Google snaps up YouTube
10.09.06 - 03:58pm
Over the last month or so YouTube has been trying to sell itself off for roughly $1.6 billion. When I initially heard the price they were asking I didn’t believe it possible for them to sell at such a high price. Look at MySpace with its quadrillion users and octillion hours of logged user hours, if they could only sell for $580 million then how could YouTube dream of cresting $1 Billion? On reflection and a spending a few minutes thinking of the logistics and advertising capabilities of the two websites I quickly rescinded my thoughts of YouTube overselling itself and started thinking it was possibly underselling itself, crazy huh?
It would only make sense for an advertising firm to buyout YouTube as it makes the perfect platform to actively target potential victims err customers. Google is currently the 16,000 pound gorilla in the targeted advertising field and coupling their advertising with YouTube’s tags and you have an immediate self-governing cash cow. One of the limiting factors of YouTube has always been the bandwidth requirements involved in streaming out millions of videos and the necessary storage space and Google has the solution for this, their multiple datacenters stashed to the rafters with stacks of computers. With potentially millions of computers, loads of available bandwidth, and a network that spans the globe, Google is the perfect home for a video streaming website. If the database for YouTube is properly distributed amongst various datacenters I can imagine significant improvements in both speed and quality of videos as the datasources could potentially be closer to the global users of YouTube. It will only take Google a little bit of adjusting with the YouTube layout and then there will be sidebars, headers, and footers crammed with Google Adsense bars, hopefully they won’t start inserting advertisements into the videos.
It looks like the relatively small amount of employees at YouTube will be buying everyone bottles of Cristal and burning money as the rewards for their efforts paid off rather handsomely. I congratulate YouTube on targeting a single service, sticking to this service, and managing to sell this service for billions. Care to send me a few Benjamins, I’m broke and ready to retire.
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