9 October 2006, Google announced that it would acquire YouTube in an all-stock $1.65 billion deal. This deal is considered among one of the most iconic deals in the Tech world. The acquisition came in less than two years of YouTube starting its operations which included testing the website and opening it up for commercial usage. YouTube was considered one of the most valuable startups before this deal. The company was founded by former PayPal employees with the website being registered on 15 February 2005.
YouTube, which was founded in February 2005, has quickly become the most well-known of several online video sites. More than 100 million videos, many of which are short videos created by the site’s users, are downloaded a day on the site.
Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim started the website with the idea for a place where people could put out content for everyone to see and discover compatible people with similar interests through a search. This was a video version of the online dating website HotOrNot. This idea was later changed and tweaked to the current format where people can share any video content on the site and have a conversation with people from all parts of the world.
“The YouTube team has built an exciting and powerful media platform that complements Google’s mission to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful,” said Google CEO Eric Schmidt in a press release.
YouTube will continue to be based in San Bruno, Calif., and all YouTube employees will remain with the company.
YouTube CEO and co-founder Chad Hurley said “By joining forces with Google, we can benefit from its global reach and technology leadership to deliver a more comprehensive entertainment experience for our users and to create new opportunities for our partners.”
Did it improve the company’s core business?
Yes. Google cares about selling ads for the list of non gamstop casino sites it promotes, and it especially cares about selling ads against search results. YouTube has evolved into the world’s biggest video search engine, with a sprawling database of clips made navigable by Google’s smart algorithms. Google can sell display and video ads against all these clips, to the tune of more than $5.2 billion in estimated revenue this year, according to eMarketer. It helps that search results from the main Google search engine are often filled with YouTube clips. Google loves when search queries drive people to other Google services, and YouTube is a big part of that strategy.
Did it benefit users?
Obviously. YouTube rid us of the scourge of buffering. It created a financial ecosystem that encouraged creatives to launch independent businesses, or at least get their 15 minutes. It let us stream almost any song we wanted for free. The site has at various times courted controversy with copyright holders, record labels, and even the video creators that give it value, but the end result for the lowly YouTube viewer has been a decade’s worth of free, fast online video. Here’s to a decade more.
