Google花了16.5亿美刀买下了Youtube。互联网真是够疯狂的。
Google to Acquire YouTube in $1.65 Billion Transaction
Story
In one of its biggest stock acquisitions to date, Google has agreed to acquire YouTube for $1.65 million in stock. With the acquisition, Google and YouTube will co-exist side by side, cultivating their own distinct brand identify. YouTube will continue to be an independent entity, operating its own offices in San Bruno CA.
"The YouTube team has built an exciting and powerful media platform that complements Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful,” said Eric Schmidt, Chief Executive Officer of Google. “Our companies share similar values; we both always put our users first and are committed to innovating to improve their experience. Together, we are natural partners to offer a compelling media entertainment service to users, content owners and advertisers.”
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Impact
This blockbuster acquisition has been rumored and discussed at great lengths throughout Silicon Valley for the past several days. I guess it was just time before the actual announcement was made. Google’s acquisition of YouTube makes sense for several reasons:
(1) Community and Reach
Charlene Li of Forrest Research pulled together an interesting analysis of why YouTube was able to develop such a huge community base in 6 short months. She states: “YouTube enjoys a much more active, enthusiastic and loyal following than any video service which has been launched by a search engine company, even more active in terms of uploading and sharing by netizens than Yahoo Video. With 35 million users in the United States alone, YouTube has proven that the success of online video is based upon sharing, commenting, ranking, embedding and suggestions… in other words; community.”
Compare the Extreme Diet Coke and Mentos Experiment Video on YouTube and Google Video, Charlene saw that the most popular YouTube video of this famous web experiment shows 519,023 views with 931 comments and 2977 ratings. Google Video on the other hand, served 363,058 views, 2347 ratings, and possibly about 40 comments.
YouTube users are using the interface to share, upload and comment on videos. Not just watch them. That’s the difference between users and community, and YouTube has community.
(2)Its shear size and volume.
Because of the this community net effect, YouTube has been able to garner 20 million unique visitors each month.
According to August comScore data, roughly 4.5M unique visited both sites cmopared to a standalone audience of 19M for YouTube and 11.9M for Google Video. This largely unduplicated audience greatly enhances and expands Google's reach.
Additionally, August data taken from Hitwise identify YouTube (based on share of visits) as the most popular destination for On-Line Video:
* YouTube: 45.46%
* MySpace Videos: 22.99%
* Google Video: 10.25%
* Yahoo! Video: 6.06%
* MSN Video: 5.92%
Just from this large user base, its easy to see why this audience would be attractive to Google.
(3) Economies of Scale and Scope
Now, let look at the numbers. A June 2006 NPR report indicated that YouTube users upload 50,000 videos a day, have approximately 72 million page views, and watch approximately 50 million clips per day. Doing some rough back of the envelop calculations we find:
With Google’s networking deals with Warner Music and Sony/BMG to include music video’s in its AdSense network, it easy to see the what and how Google will be able to recoup its $1.65 billion expenditure. More importantly, that translation into its deal with MySpace has an added upside.
