Google acquired YouTube and what's next?
If you were happy wasting hours in front of everyone's favorite (mostly clean) amateur video sharing website, YouTube, before, you've got a reason to cheer- this past week, it was acquired by search engine giant Google.com for $1.6 billion.
It seems as if the latest business model for an internet startup these days is not bent on longevity. Rather, the general theme on the World Wide Web is to come up with a quirky idea, build lots of buzz and interest, and then be acquired by a media giant like Google. With a check such as that now in the hands of YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen potentially waiting for nerdy grad students working on their senior theses, perhaps those Silicon Valley skeptics were wrong about the fleeting nature of success in the .com world. Last year, Google bought up thirteen smaller corporations, and continues to roll on over competitors in the tier just below their largest rival, Yahoo.
So, there is a business side to all this, but the average bored dorm room denizen wasting his life on YouTube is most likely not thinking about mergers and acquisitions. The biggest question to end users (as it always is with these types of deals) is "What does this mean for me, and how will it change my use of both sites?"
Despite all the buzz about a whole new way to search on GooTube.com, Google's representatives have made it a point to reassure users that each site will maintain its own brand identity. YouTube will still run as a free shareware site, and Google will still know what type of underpants Albert Einstein was wearing when he was working on the Theory of Relativity. Also, in case you were wondering about Google's recent foray into the video sharing market- Google Video," that will still be around as well. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin (sensing a pattern here?) justify this by explaining that Google Video is merely a search engine for video files on the entire internet. They admitted that it does not allow for file sharing, one of YouTube's best selling points, and that they started to seriously consider turning the wheels on acquiring YouTube when research showed that a comparatively large number of searches on Google Video were hitting YouTube anyway.
This merger comes at a hefty price for America's widest-used search engine. $1.6 billion has been spent at a great risk. Page admits that YouTube will be the company's most risky venture to date. As it is currently, the video sharing site is not geared at all to generate the profit it needs to pay for itself and eventually put Google in the green.
/sjuhawknews.com/
It seems as if the latest business model for an internet startup these days is not bent on longevity. Rather, the general theme on the World Wide Web is to come up with a quirky idea, build lots of buzz and interest, and then be acquired by a media giant like Google. With a check such as that now in the hands of YouTube co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen potentially waiting for nerdy grad students working on their senior theses, perhaps those Silicon Valley skeptics were wrong about the fleeting nature of success in the .com world. Last year, Google bought up thirteen smaller corporations, and continues to roll on over competitors in the tier just below their largest rival, Yahoo.
So, there is a business side to all this, but the average bored dorm room denizen wasting his life on YouTube is most likely not thinking about mergers and acquisitions. The biggest question to end users (as it always is with these types of deals) is "What does this mean for me, and how will it change my use of both sites?"
Despite all the buzz about a whole new way to search on GooTube.com, Google's representatives have made it a point to reassure users that each site will maintain its own brand identity. YouTube will still run as a free shareware site, and Google will still know what type of underpants Albert Einstein was wearing when he was working on the Theory of Relativity. Also, in case you were wondering about Google's recent foray into the video sharing market- Google Video," that will still be around as well. Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin (sensing a pattern here?) justify this by explaining that Google Video is merely a search engine for video files on the entire internet. They admitted that it does not allow for file sharing, one of YouTube's best selling points, and that they started to seriously consider turning the wheels on acquiring YouTube when research showed that a comparatively large number of searches on Google Video were hitting YouTube anyway.
This merger comes at a hefty price for America's widest-used search engine. $1.6 billion has been spent at a great risk. Page admits that YouTube will be the company's most risky venture to date. As it is currently, the video sharing site is not geared at all to generate the profit it needs to pay for itself and eventually put Google in the green.
/sjuhawknews.com/
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