Article 2: Google Buys Youtube

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15196982/ns/business-us_business/t/google-buys-youtube-billion/#.TsQqYsOAq0t


In October 2006,  Google Inc. announced its decision to purchase YouTube, the popular video-sharing site, for $1.65 billion. Under the terms of the deal, YouTube would remain independently operated at the outset, keeping a separate brand and keeping its headquarters in San Bruno along with Youtubes co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen as employees, and all YouTube's other employees will remain with the company. Google will keep also keep running Google Video, a less profitable site.


The deal had put pressure on Yahoo to buy facebook.com in order to stay in the market. The history of youtube is quite simple. It started in Hurley's garage in 2005, he made the site to be able to share videos with family online. Since then the website has blossomed and now  shows more than 100 million video clips per day along with it's worldwide audience of 72.1 million in august 2006.


I think that $1.65 bn is a nice price for a simple concept. The dealmaking reflects how the growth of online, user-created video has emerged as a potential source of revenue for the sagging recording industry. There have been and still are many copyright infringement lawsuits against Youtube (usually by Sony or other companies) for the use of music on this site, I think this is ridiculous as Youtube is an easy way to advertise music before you download it. In 2011, Google now owns Youtube, Blogger, Gmail, FeedBurner, Picnik and all the other assorted Google apps. I wonder whether it's a good or bad thing that Google owns a huge chunk of the internet.