So the courting of YouTube is over – with Google the winning suitor (if you believe paying $1.65 billion for the site is a win). Yesterday’s announcement follows months of speculation about which media company would end up with the leading online video site, which serves up a reported 100 million video views per day (tidbit: the deal was hatched over lunch just last Wednesday — at a Denny’s).
On the surface it seems YouTube should never have existed. Rewind the clock to a year ago. All of the major online players – Yahoo!, AOL, MSN – already had online video products and were investing millions in R&D to improve their video user experience. So how did startup YouTube come out of thin air to be worth $1.65 billion?
One big reason – sharability. Video content on YouTube is easily linked to, easily subscribed to, easily shared, and — most importantly — easily embedded in blogs. YouTube rode the soaring popularity of social media by building the best platform for sharing of video content. And the result is that Google – a company that knows a thing or two about building great online user experiences – cried uncle, admitted YouTube had out-innovated them, and ponied up for the acquisition.
It’s a nice lesson for media companies and marketers. If you want to add value, think sharability.
Baba Shetty 
Baba;
You are certainly correct that YouTube built a better mousetrap against all odds. But YouTube’s achievement could become its undoing if Hollywood law prevails in what will be the OJ of copyright court cases. YouTube is more in need of Google’s secret sauce in collecting and disbursing micro-transactions than Google needs sharability. YouTube’s got a novel idea for paying off big entertainment, but Google was the only place they could go to figure out how ad revenue can pay off the long list of producers, publishers, studios, and artists getting in line to file suit. I hope they get it done. The big price tag will only put gas on this fire.