It is official. Google bought YouTube for $1.65 Billion in stock.

The WSJ had insider information already yesterday morning that Google will announce the deal after the market closes. They were right.

YouTube will operate independently to preserve its successful brand and passionate community.

"Our community has played a vital role in changing the way that people consume media, creating a new clip culture. 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," said Chad Hurley, CEO and Co-Founder of YouTube. YouTube currently delivers more than 100 million video views every day There are different statistics about this out there. ComScore has YouTube thrid with 649 million videos served/month.

Microsoft opted to build their own video sharing service dubbed soapbox and passed on buying YouTube.
Mark Cuban said early September: "only a moron would buy YouTube." Now Google would be the moron according to the dot-com billionaire veteran.
It is for sure that Google and YouTube need to solve the copyright issue to net get their pants sued off, but all video sharing platforms have this issue. I still think 1.65 billion is too much for YouTube. On the other hand, it does not make a difference to Google. They do not know where to put all the money. And then they did not even use the cash and only did a stock deal.

German YouTube knock-off ClipFish is running TV ads these days. I guess they want to make sure they will be the largest video sharing community in Germany and someone with deep pockets will come visit and buy them. This has happend quite often in the past. Not sure if it will work with video sharing, as the industry is split on building versus buying.

More details in this Google press-release.