October 6 2006
It was announced today that Google is in talks to buy online video host YouTube for $1.6 Billion. YouTube has also been talking with Yahoo and Microsoft over an acquisiton that could be valued up to $2 Billion.
It's easy to see why they'd want to get their hands on a site that that serves 100 million videos per day and sees 65000 new uploads every day. Teamed up with Google, the massive behemoth GoogleTube might one day be serving a billion videos per day, embedding video ads within everything from global search results to individual mail accounts, supplementing the growing worldwide audience that now forms the core of their traffic.
GoogleTube will expand worldwide, devouring bandwith and fulfilling their global manifest destiny. Sites like GoogleTube China and GoogleTube Europe ("EuroTube"?) will have hundreds of millions of users and dwarf the success of their US cousin. Maybe one day we'll see GoogleTube offering a Skype-like service that allows free video conferencing between any two points on Earth. Let us hold hands and pray.