Well, after a few hectic days of gossip the truth is out.. Google has actually bought youTube for a paltry $1.65 billion in shares. Wow. That means a 1 cent drop in price from the current value of $4.29 means a loss of.. ooo.. $5 million. That’s painful. Time for me to upload some more videos of my nephew singing – they must be worth something now.
What is most amazing about this, other than the flurry of internet rumour over the past few days, is that youTube only launched back in February 2005 – which makes their valuation roughly $1 billion/year. The combination of a great service and hooking into mySpace early on has accelerated them to a stage where they now have an estimated 72 million users. Oh, that and not being too fussy about letting people upload copyrighted content of course.. Their only concession to that was a while back limiting the upload length of content to three minutes – early on you could upload entire films if you wanted, and many complete episodes of brand new shows (especially South Park’s amazing scientology bashing). Now of course youTube are negotiating with many content providers to prevent law suits. As someone keeps saying to me, it’s better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
In other exciting news – the re-designed Tridias site is now live. Go check it out and buy toys from the lovely folks (if you’re in the UK). If you find any problems with the site’s HTML then let me know.