Yahoo for YouTube (founders)

Wow. $1.65 billion dollars. $1.65B.

That's the price, in GOOG stock, that Google will pay to the online video start-up YouTube to acquire its technology, intellectual property, content, brand, etc.

That's a lot of dollars.

When I first read rumors of a potential deal, I thought: 'wow -- they're too expensive / overpriced, it'll never happen.' Then I read late last night (early this morning) that it was a done deal. I still think it's expensive, but Google can afford it, and it makes sense for them. Online video is big (and growing) and represents a formidable revenue opportunity from increased page views and the accompanying advertising. It's Google's largest acquisition to date, and it will put them squarely in the lead in the online-video-sharing space. Heretofore, their videos.google.com offering has not been as strong as they may have hoped. In addition to the videos themselves, this opens up opportunities for increased social networking amongst an already-faithful Google user base, increased delivery mechanisms for a variety of video content (remember: Apple's doing movies and TV shows via iTunes), and an awful lot of buzz and boost from a much-ballyhooed start-up.

Its founders are young. I don't know what kind of golden handcuffs they'll be receiving, but boy, they are some very-well-off young men now. It will be interesting to watch and see how the brand and buzz around YouTube changes as it becomes part of Google. It still remains to be seen how GooYougleTube will deal with the copyright and intellectual property issues around content, though the revenue sharing deals announced today may be a harbinger of things to come.

I remember well 10 or so years ago when bright young folks (and some not-so-bright) were starting to make a lot of money via the web and its new opportunities. While we haven't had a dearth of examples, we've now got some powerful new ones of this young-technologist-gets-fabulously-wealthy-quickly model. Who's next...?