While CNet heralds a triumph for social computing (and asks marketers to face the music and get comfortable with UGC videos), CNN Money augurs “the beginning of the end?”
Dalka points to a few good, unanswered questions on the deal: Will the unprecedented operational independence Google’s giving YouTube provide enough distance to partially protect the buyer from copyright infringement lawsuits? And, will the users (now at over 20 million) stay if Google has to clean house?
Forever Geek discovers the zen in the new alliance: an alignment of cultures willing to fight against the copyright overlords, a similar knack for accumulating prized industry data, and the brand name.
A VC highlights, from an earlier post, how this startup landed the biggest acquisition offer Google has ever made–and in transit “kicked Google’s ass (and everyone else’s too).”
TechCrunch posted the original scoop on the rumor– ahead of most major media outlets, including the NYT, as the blogosphere was quick to note.
Mark Cuban plays a singular devil’s advocate in the dissent, on a count of the landslide of copyright violation suits to come. And in that prediction, of course, he’s no lone cassandra. Copyright suit magnet? asks the Journal.
Business Week discusses YouTube’s maneuvers to fend against suits, including a new ‘copyright fingerprint’ tag it will implement to allow owners of copyrighted materials to take part in the viral-sharing decision and subsequent ad revenue.
On the other side of the fence… Robert Scoble asks, what if was Microsoft that bought YouTube? In all fairness, Yahoo News runs an AP article entitled “Google eclipses rivals with YouTube.” (now that is editorial restraint.)
The YouTube co-founders, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, have their celebratory clip joking, “The king of search and the king of video have gotten together— we’re going to have it our way.”
But it’s fair to say a YouTube user has created a more professional clip: a droll vid on what users can expect from the Google-YouTube honeymoon.
I wonder ehen will they call up bloggers to attend conference calls. I have done a comprehensive coverage of all the GoogTube issues on my site.
YouTube is cool, but why didn’t Google spend all the money on marketing instead? They could have dominated their own marketing channel(google adwords) for quite some time for all that money?
Was it because Youtube had deals with the publishers?
Sometimes it is better, to buy a running company than try to develop a contrahent.
1.5 Billion Dollars could build a heck of a lot more than a relatively simple popularity contest for videos.
But YouTube wasn’t even making a profit! And they were struggling to find a means to even look close to doing so. Why did Google have to pay so much? It’s a good marriage but I just don’t get how they arbitrarily came up with the end sum
I agree with KP’s point, many companies don’t invest enough in customer engangement and promotion.