YouTube acquisition?

I wanted to desist from posting this, as I had seen a lot of blogs post the same thing over and over again, but I guess it is just so exciting that I cannot hold it back .. Well, not any longer :)


Google might acquire YouTube for a whopping $2 billion. If you thought that was a big price to pay, take a look at these stats!
YouTube is the no.1 online video sharing site. I know some of you might contend this citing that MySpace is bigger, but I think we shouldn't compare them both..YouTube is for video enthusiasts, by video enthusiasts and has been built by a bunch of video enthusiasts. Think about it -- a company that was almost nothing, less than a year ago is in the "ivy league" now...that is no mean achievement! Here are some detailed stats :-

Back in November 2005, Google Video was more popular than YouTube. A whopping 400,000 more people visited Google Video.

- In August,2006 - 15.9 million more people used YouTube vs Google Video! Quite a turn-around!

- YouTube has grown 483% since January, while Google Video has grown 279%. Wow.

Verdict: YouTube is the clear winner in terms of Visitors to the site.

In August,2006 - on an average each YouTube user visited the site 4 times over the course of the month. While Google Video visitors returned just 1.6 times.

Verdict: YouTube is the clear winner in terms of Frequency of Visits.

Bottomline is that YouTube has more users, more visits and users that spend a lot of time on their website and it is in a growing market. It current has 100 million videos and a userbase of around 25 million and the video market is set for tremendous growth with incresingly faster networks..A picture is worth a thousand words and a video is obviously much more than that :). Google surely wants to sink it's feet deep into the current social networking revolution. It is disappointed that it couldn't get as big as MySpace or Facebook with it's own Orkut and it surely wouldn't want to lose out on this opportunity with YouTube.

$2 billion is a big price, but is still worth only a drop in Google's big bucket. Now, is a better time to buy it than ever!

Only issue being .. all the copyright infringements that it will be tagged with once it gets YouTube under it's umbrella..But well, it is already fighting a lot of battles in this regard..this will just be one more! If it can come up with innovative ideas on selling it's content without affecting a user's experience and still make money for the media companies and advertisers, copyright infringements would be a moot point! There's already a lot of din going on against DRM and there will be more if user's are at the receiving end. Media companies surely don't want to lose out on this Internet era, where an increasing number of users seem to be more time on Internet than Television! Well, atleast I do :)..

Let's just wait and see if this rumour has any reality to it!!