Wall Street Journal: Google in talks to buy Youtube, Arstechnica calls Bullshit
Right on the heels of Mark Cuban’s comments that only a fool would buy Youtube, The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Google is in talks to buy the video portal:
A purchase of YouTube could give a big boost to the online video efforts of Google. YouTube commanded 46% of visits to U.S. online video sites in August, according to market research firm Hitwise. That compared to a 23% share for the video activities of News Corp.’s MySpace social-networking site, and 10% for Google Video.
Reports put the price at 1.6 billion. However, “talks” don’t atomaticallly mean there will be a sale. Go ahead and read why Arstechnica thinks its all sizzle and no steak.
Universal Music CEO Doug “Youtube owes us millions” Morris, must really be excited about the deal. Suing Google–who according to the article as off June had 10 billion dollars in cash–is a juicy proposition. I would be stoked if my intellectual property rights were being flagrantly violated. Here is the WSJ portrait of Chad “my company is not for sale” Hurley.
Founder of Youtube.
UPDATE:From Paid Content at the ONA Confab:
Mark Cuban, who recently made waves by suggesting only a moron would buy YouTube, is the afternoon keynote here. We talked beforehand and I’ll post about that later. He’s up on the podium now, Diet Cokes at hand, fielding questions in a straight q-and-a session. The first came from the NYTCO’s Vivian Schiller, who introduced him and kicked off with a Google-YouTube question. His response: “The minute that acquisition took place YouTube couldn’t be YouTube.”