Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Google buys YouTube
How do you earn one point six five billion dollars in twenty one months? Now that I have your attention, let me welcome you to Cybersurf, your weekly update on what is happening on the internet.
I am your Cybershost, Steven Lang, this week telling you about two guys who probably made the quickest first billion in history.
In February last year, the two guys, both still in their twenties, Chad Hurley and Steven Chen took a number of videos at a dinner party and thought it would be nice to share the videos with their friends. But there was a problem; there was no easy way of sharing the videos.
Hurley and Chen drew up a plan; spoke to Sequoia investments for start up capital and soon YouTube dot com was born – It was not the first site to offer video sharing, in fact when it came on stream, Yahoo was the eight hundred pound gorilla in video sharing.
A year ago – Yahoo had 85 percent of the market – it has now dropped to less than six percent while YouTube is the market leader with forty six percent.
Google made a concerted effort to get a grip on the market, and did manage to grab a solid eleven percent, but they soon realized that YouTube was better so they bought it – for one point six five billion dollars.
Almost every big media and technology company has courted YouTube as they sought to tap into a new generation of consumers who are viewing 100 million short videos on the site every day.
It was exactly two months ago that YouTube was first mentioned on Cybersurf – as one of Time Magazine’s Top fifty coolest sites.
This week’s announcement sounds very much like the heady days of the dot com boom, when investment companies were forcing millions of dollars into the sweaty hands of Silicon Valley Geeks.
Does this mean Web two point zero is coming of age? The answer is probably yes! But not for us. The high price of broadband access is making sure that the majority of South Africans will not be able to share in the success of Web two point zero.
On a more constructive note… the World Food Program or WFP has released a free video game in seven languages – French, Hungarian, Chinese, Italian, Japanese, Polish and of course English. The game, which is targeted at children aged eight to thirteen, is available as a free download at www.food-force.com let’s hear that one time food hyphen force dot com.
Food force is a different type of video game – it is primarily educational, teaching children about the problem of hunger and the importance of humanitarian aid work.
The games are being released in the lead up to World Food Day next Monday, and so far almost five million downloads have made Food Force a big success story.
And so we come to the end of this week’s Cybersurf. I will put this script on the Cybersurf Blog which you can find at Cybersurf dot blogspot dot com – just in case you missed any of the addresses.
Please join me again next Wednesday for more on the best of the web.
