GOOGLE BOUGHT YOUTUBE: GOOD IDEA?

It has been perhaps a year and a half since I first heard of YouTube. The service is not quite two years old and already it's worth $1.6 billion (!) – at least it's worth that much to Google.

My gut reaction to Google's pursuit and purchase of YouTube is that it was caught up in a second Internet boom that will undoubtedly go bust. Honestly, how can a business of any kind less than two years old be worth nearly $2 billion?

Okay, Google is not driving a truck filled with money to YouTube's doors; this is a stock swap. Even so, value is value.

On the other hand, Google may know what it's doing. YouTube has the most coveted online commodity of all: eyeballs – and lots of them. And every single set visits YouTube almost every day to see the latest crazy, unusual, wacky videos. I know kids of friends who do so.

Their parents call them iVideots.

Google is banking on YouTube's millions of iVideots, the folks who visit often and even log in to see some gated videos. I did that, too.

In buying YouTube, it appears that Google is giving a strong vote of no confidence to its own young Google Video sub site. I've used that site to convert and host my own videos (it works amazingly well, by the way), but Google Video never has the great collection of quirky videos I can find on YouTube.

I guess it's time to take bets on when Google will pull the plug on its own video site, or at least when it will merge whatever it's built into YouTube.

Why did Google buy YouTube at this time?

Well, it has money – or at least stock – to burn, it knows a good thing when it sees it, and someone there understands that you can't swim upstream forever.

It's a lesson Microsoft would do well to learn. The Redmond software giant is expert at flogging its own services into infinity, no matter the odds or low or diminishing returns. MSN Messenger, for example, has never been as big as AOL's AIM and likely never will be.

Still, Microsoft probably will never buy AOL and blend AIM with the nifty features found in MSN Messenger (or is it Live Messenger now?).

So, yeah, maybe Google is atop a new Internet bubble, but it does things in a way quite different from any company called a success back in 1999. It moves much faster and knows how to integrate and produce revenue streams lightning-fast.

YouTube devotees may not like what they see in the near future, however.

Text ads will be sprinkled throughout the right column, below the latest video. They'll likely relate to the video's title and captions. A video about a terrorist trying to blow up a Volkswagen (the car's so solidly built that it contains the explosion) will ride herd with Volkswagen ad text.

Google has to be concerned that no one will ever click on those ads because that's not why they watch YouTube videos; they watch them for entertainment. That's all.

Meanwhile, the amateur videographers and auteurs hoping to be discovered as the next Spielberg will now have to worry that those turned off by Google's seemingly ever-growing oligarchy and ad placements may stop visiting YouTube and look for a site unsullied by revenue lust.

I wish Google luck.

Dennis Turner