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Saturday, October 07, 2006
Om Malik thinks the Google-Youtube rumor is pretty thin, and that Google would be just opening itself up to lawsuits and mayhem by acquiring the video-upload service.
Greg Linden feels that Youtube has nothing unique other than users, and that it simply isn't Googly.
Sure, but neither was Sprinks.
So, here's the counter view. "You buy it to kill it." And secondarily, to add a little more reach to your ad network, to make it that much more interesting than Yahoo's.
Are we forgetting that Google already has a video platform that uses similar approaches to tagging as Youtube? That Google is developing methods of policing invalid content?
So potentially, the acquisition gets digested in stages, eventually resulting in the demise of Youtube and a lot of momentum for Google Video, which would operate under a significantly different set of rules. In addition, the modus operandi of Google in terms of organizing the world's content seems to be pretty consistent: push the legal envelope early and often, in order to spur talks with large content providers to create formal agreements to replace a patchwork of look-the-other-way-because-we-are-trying-to-look-cool, and the occasional you-pushed-us-too-far-and-now-we're-litigating.
Watching Youtube pursue that very method must have woken Google up a bit. A Youtube that has now successfully leveraged their scale into some formal agreements with content providers is a Youtube Google can make sense of, and potentially integrate into the long-term plan.
P.S. Looks like Cramer agrees.
Posted by
Andrew Goodman
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