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Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Chad and Steve? I Don’t Like You Anymore.

posted by on October 10 at 9:37 AM

As mentioned previously, Google has acquired YouTube for a whopping 16.5 billion[Update correction: 1.65 billion]. And while I certainly understand why its two founders, Chad and Steve are psyched about suddenly becoming billionaires… I can’t help but watch this following video and HATE THEIR FUCKING GUTS. Join me, if you will, in screaming at your computer, “shut up, Shut Up, SHUT UP!!!”

Thanks to Gorillamask!

RSS icon Comments

1

the phrase "wipe that shit eating grin off your face" comes to mind. Oh... and bull$hit!

...YouTube will utilize leading-edge paradigms to integrate best-of-breed web-readiness and deploy virtual web-readiness in partnership with Google. By reintermediating strategic vortals we will transition leading-edge models by productizing proactive technologies with matrix impactful action-items. By targeting frictionless partnerships and iterating viral schemas we can grow ubiquitous portals...

I'M FILTHY RICH!

Posted by charles | October 10, 2006 9:59 AM
2

Uh...I think it was only $1.65 Billion. It's still a load of cash.

Posted by Dork | October 10, 2006 10:16 AM
3

Left-wing fascism meets & gets bought by left-wing crony capitalism. Cooool.

"A Slippery Slope of Censorship at YouTube"

Last week, as YouTube continued its recent campaign to spit-shine its image and, perhaps, to look a little less ragtag to potential buyers (including Google, which was said to be eyeing the upstart in the $1.6 billion range), the company took a scrub bucket to some questionable political graffiti on its servers, including a video entry from the doyenne of right-wing blogs, Michelle Malkin (michellemalkin.com).

YouTube users can flag any video as containing pornography, mature content or graphic violence, depicting illegal acts or being racially or ethnically offensive. A video is removed — as Ms. Malkin’s was on Sept. 28 — only if a review by the company’s customer support department agrees that it is inappropriate, or that the video is on its face in violation of the site’s terms of use.

But the incident raised some questions about the fine line YouTube’s administrators walk when they decide to respond to users’ complaints about contributions to the site — a mechanism that is fraught with the potential for vindictive shenanigans...

...Many, but not all, newspapers were frightened away from publication of the Muhammad cartoons. But the cartoons, and other images of Muhammad, can be found all over the Internet, as individual users decide for themselves whether or not they will abide by the Islamic restrictions on Muhammad imagery. Hosts of such images include the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which, among other images, has one of the prophet atop a camel, in a leaf of “Majmac al-tawarikh,” or the Compendium of Histories, at snipurl.com/mb3j.

This is not to suggest that Ms. Malkin’s video would not be particularly offensive to some people. There is little that Ms. Malkin says or does that is not. But it is hard to imagine what YouTube hopes to gain by punting such content, or what sort of uphill rhetorical battle it is setting itself up for when it does so.

Posted by tie its tubes | October 10, 2006 11:08 AM
4

@3, just wait. YouTube is going to start to get lame real fast now that its corporately pwned. Just look at MySpace after News Corp bought it: tons of stories about child engangerment, copyright infringement, etc. etc. MySpace only became the subject of MSM coverage (and a juicy target for litigation) after a multi-million dollar deal legitimized it for society at large. Now that YouTube is For Real(tm), they're going to be the target of more law suits, more scrutiny, and more restrictions. And ads. Google bought itself a potential headache, but they've positioned themselves to go head to head with msft's own YouTube clone.

thats the problem with web 2.0 sites: their success inevitably precludes their longevity simply based on the fact an "anything goes" business model fundamentally *has* to change under corporate ownership, and that which brought you success goes out the window. Before you know it, you're napster

Posted by charles | October 10, 2006 11:33 AM
5

Fine them every time they say "community."

Posted by Misty Brown | October 10, 2006 12:02 PM
6

Ewwww.. why do they both have cold sores?

Posted by Amy Kate | October 10, 2006 12:09 PM
7

Google is reportedly going to be prepending 15 second ads to all the videos too. Hmm.

Posted by Fnarf | October 10, 2006 12:15 PM
8

We're rich, Bitches!

Posted by Lindsay B | October 10, 2006 12:16 PM
9

Why did they go to TGIFridays to celebrate?

Posted by DOUG. | October 10, 2006 12:17 PM
10

Someone yesterday asserted that YouTube would be "a drop in the bucket" in terms of bandwidth for Google. But YouTube has about a fifth of the daily reach of Google (number of viewers), according to Alexa, and YouTube is serving up multi-megabyte videos, over a hundred million of them a day, whereas Google is for the most part serving up relatively small pages of plain text.

I don't know how much money YouTube burned through in this past year, but it's got to be a horrific amount; they have virtually no advertising and no revenue at all, but are the 6th-most visited site on the internet, and considerably higher than that in bandwidth costs.

My guess is most of the $1.65 billion goes back to the venture capitalists who funded it. The "founders" are more than likely a couple of Shawn Fannings who hit on an idea, sold it, and will now fade into the woodwork as people realize they didn't make YouTube, they found it.

The whole thing just seems so 1999....

Posted by Fnarf | October 10, 2006 12:42 PM

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