The recent acquisition of video-sharing site YouTube by Google for a spectacular USD 1.65 billion in stock has started people thinking that the crazy and insane valuations of the 90s which led to the first dot-com boom were back (read e.g. the New York Times article).
In these days where everybody puts his or her thoughts on-line in the form of a blog or newsletter, it is not difficult to find people that do not agree with that statement. One example is Tristan Louis of the TNL.net weblog, which has listed the recent acquisition prices of dot-com companies, and comes to the conclusion that although the YouTube price is hefty (but not as hefty as the price EBay paid for Skype), there is no sign yet of a Bubble 2.0.
Meanwhile, research analyst Gartner warns Google that it won't realize the full potential of its YouTube deal if it does not clean up the mess with copyrighted materials at YouTube.com. Major media companies including News Corp. (which was not happy with the Google/YouTube deal), GE's NBC Universal and Viacom plan to take action against YouTube if the company doesn't do more to keep unauthorized use of copyrighted media out of the videos posted to the site. Those lawsuits could cost Google much more than what it paid for YouTube in the first place (and in stock).
Posted by admin at October 18, 2006 05:19 PM