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I have no idea.

Is a company with 67 people of staff (and how much sales?) worth $ 1.65 bn ?
I do not know.

I know that the deal is an all stock transaction, so basically Google is buying videos with paper.

There are a lot of reactions, obviously. From 6 reasons to 10 questions, the view of the expert, the choice of buying YouTube versus the New York Times, the supporter, the difficulty of making predictions, and the virtue of persistence.

What is interesting about the deal is how Google failed to compete with YouTube. The reward for pioneers is still high on the Web. Timing is key, being the first one everything. Even a company as powerful as Google could not do anything against the leader in this field. You cannot patent ideas on the net but you are likely to make money out of it if you are first.

It seems to have a double hedge as it implies that “anyone” can start a multi billion company from scratch in two years, but also that the network and notoriety effects are so important that it is very difficult to challenge the leader (leading to a monopolistic situation?). Unless you propose a new paradigm shift Web revolutions are taking place at a dramatic pace!

Although a lot of videos published there are not original, YouTube is an excellent illustration of how people are getting involved in creating their own content. A lot of people are taking a chance, though their motivations may vary: a survey from Mediametrie (sorry I could not find the results on their site) points out that more than 17% of the French Internet users publish original contents on the Net, mostly through blogs.

YouTube makes Warhol famous line, in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes, comes more real than ever. Regular TV is slightly out of date, but you can count on YouTube for 15 minutes fame!

Chad and Steve look happy and they sure had more than 15 minutes!

RD

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 11th, 2006 at 6:51 pm and is filed under Real Questions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.