This is an amazing video that shows how Google eventually takes over the world and develops its own space program, very interesting.

> I’m an experienced veteran in the digital media business and thought
> I’d share my version of events that happened at Youtube. Some of this
> is based on talks with people involved and some is speculation based
> on my experience working in the industry, negotiating settlements and
> battling in court.
>
> In the months preceding the sale of YouTube the complaints from
> copyright owners began to mount at a ferocious pace. Small content
> owners and big were lodging official takedown notices only to see
> their works almost immediately reappear. These issues had to be
> disclosed to the suitors who were sniffing around like Google but
> Yahoo was deep in the process as well. (News Corp inquired but since
> Myspace knew they were a big source of Youtube’s traffic they quickly
> choked on the 9 digit price tag.) While the search giants had serious
> interest, the suitors kept stumbling over the potential enormous
> copyright infringement claims that were mounting.
>
> Youtube knew they had an issue and had offered a straight revenue
> share deal if the complainants would call off the dogs and give them
> time. The media companies quickly rejected this path for two reasons.
> First off Youtube wasn’t making any money and was fuzzy about how they
> would generate revenue in the future. But more important the media
> companies view is that there was a mountain of past infringement that
> Youtube had engaged in and built their business on and they felt they
> deserved some of this accumulated value. And who could blame them. In
> spite of the media “user generated” puff pieces it was clear to all
> involved that they generated that content by hooking up their TV tuner
> cards to their PCs.
>
> It didn’t take a team of Harvard trained investment bankers to come up
> with the obvious solution and that is to set aside a portion of the
> buyout offer to deal with copyright issues. It’s not uncommon in
> transactions to have holdbacks to deal with liabilities and Youtube
> knew they had a big one. So the parties (including venture capital
> firm Sequoia Capital) agreed to earmark a portion of the purchase
> price to pay for settlements and/or hire attorneys to fight claims.
> Nearly 500 million of the 1.65 billion purchase price is not being
> disbursed to shareholders but instead held in escrow.
>
> While this seemed good on paper Google attorneys were still
> uncomfortable with the enormous possible legal claims and speculated
> that maybe even 500 million may not be enough – remember were talking
> about hundreds of thousands of possible copyright infringements.
> Youtube attorneys emphasized the DMCA safe harbor provisions and
> pointed to the 3 full timers dedicated to dealing with takedown
> notices, but couldn’t get G comfortable. Google wasn’t worried about
> the small guys, but the big guys were a significant impediment to a
> sale. They could swing settlement numbers widely in one direction or
> another. So the decision was made to negotiate settlements with some
> of the largest music and film companies. If they could get to a good
> place with these companies they could get confidence from attorneys
> and the ever important “fairness opinion” from the bankers involved
> that this was a sane purchase.
>
> Armed with this kitty of money Youtube approached the media companies
> with an open checkbook to buy peace. The media companies smelled a
> transaction when Youtube radically changed their initial ‘revenue
> sharing’ offer to one laden with cash. But even they didn’t predict
> Google would pay such an exorbitant amount for Youtube so when Youtube
> started talking in multiples of tens of millions of dollars the media
> companies believed this to be fair and would lock in a nice Q3/Q4.
> [Note to self: Buy calls on media companies just prior to Q3/Q4
> earnings calls.] The major labels got wind that their counterparts
> were in heated discussions so they used a now common trick a “most
> favored nation” clause to assure that if if a comparable company
> negotiated a better deal that they would also receive that benefit.
> It’s a clever ploy to avoid anti-trust issues and gives them the
> benefit of securing the best negotiating company. They negotiated
> about 50 million for each major media company to be paid from the
> Google buyout monies.
>
> The media companies had their typical challenges. Specifically, how to
> get money from Youtube without being required to give any to the
> talent (musicians and actors)? If monies were received as part of a
> license to Youtube then they would contractually obligated to share a
> substantial portion of the proceeds with others. For example most
> record label contracts call for artists to get 50% of all license
> deals. It was decided the media companies would receive an equity
> position as an investor in Youtube which Google would buy from them.
> This shelters all the up front monies from any royalty demands by
> allowing them to classify it as gains from an investment position. A
> few savvy agents might complain about receiving nothing and get a
> token amount, but most will be unaware of what transpired.
>
> Since everyone was reaching into Google’s wallet, the big G wants to
> make sure the Youtube purchase was a wise one. Youtube’s value is
> predicated on it’s traffic and market leadership which Google needs to
> keep. If they simply agreed to remove all unauthorized content and
> saddle the user experience with ads Youtube would quickly be a
> skeleton of its prior self. Users would quickly move to competing
> sites. The media companies had 50 million reasons to want to help.
> Google needed a two pronged strategy which you see unfolding now.
>
> The first request was a simple one and that was an agreement to look
> the other way for the next 6 months or so while copyright infringement
> continues to flourish. This standstill is cloaked in language about
> building tools to help manage the content and track royalties, some of
> which is true but also G knows that every day they can operate in the
> shadows of copyright law is another day that Youtube can grow. It
> should be noted that Google video is a capable Youtube competitor with
> the ONE big difference being a much more sincere effort to not post
> unauthorized works – and Google fully appreciates what a difference
> that makes. So you can continue to find movie clips, tv show segments
> and just about every music video on Youtube today.
>
> The second request was to pile some lawsuits on competitors to slow
> them down and lock in Youtube’s position. As Google looked at it they
> bought a 6 month exclusive on widespread video copyright infringement.
> Universal obliged and sued two capable Youtube clones Bolt and
> Grouper. This has several effects. First, it puts enormous pressure on
> all the other video sites to clamp down on the laissez-faire content
> posting that is prevalent. If Google is agreeing to remove
> unauthorized content they want the rest of the industry doing the same
> thing. Secondly it shuts off the flow of venture capital investments
> into video firms. Without capital these firms can’t build the data
> centers and pay for the bandwidth required for these upside down
> businesses.
>
> There are some interesting chapters yet to unfold. One is how much of
> this will become public. Google is required by the SEC to disclose
> material financial developments at their company. Working in Google’s
> advantage is their enormous market capitalization and revenues will
> give them considerable leeway to claim that a 50 million transaction
> is not significant to their business. If the other video sites have
> the wherewithal to put up a legal fight any decent attorney will
> demand access to Youtube acquisition documents. Expect a claim of
> collusion between Google and the media companies as a defense
> strategy.
>
> Infringement lawsuits will be served on Youtube and the new proud
> parent Google in the coming months. Google will respond with two
> paths: an expensive legal fight or a quick and easy settlement with
> most choosing the latter. Are there any larger copyright holders such
> as music publishers, movie studios, or unlicensed record label EMI
> that put up a fight rather than accepting the check? We’ll have to
> watch and find out.

It has been pretty interesting to me that Youtube has been down a lot recently ever since the Google buy out. Of course this is scheduled down time and not out of YouTube’s hands. One thing they have not let us in on is any of the inner workings of YouTube and exactly how much more bandwidth YouTube is using now and how exactly Google plans to make money from the buy.

You will notice that there are still many different advertisers running on YouTube and not just adsense. I would think that Google would want to use their own advertising to make maximum profits.

There will be many more opportunities for Google to make money off YouTube. They can sign deals for content distribution with major record labels and movie studios. Still the 1 Billion+ price tag Google paid for Youtube has Bubble written all over it.

Is You Tube cracking under the new weight Google put on it?

Maybe all the publicity from the Google buy out is slamming their servers? Better hurry up and move YouTube data over to Google Servers!

Today on Googles press release page they announced that they are infact buying YouTube. Its a great move for Google, they will now dominate the video market on the internet. Google video was already pretty good but owning YouTube pretty much guarantees that they are going to be the exclusive provider of all things video.

Whats happens now?

My guess is that they will integrate YouTube into Google video now or maybe even eliminate Google video alltogether and just use YouTube links on their main page.

What about the constant copyright issues YouTube faces?

With the current 100 billion + market cap Google has and all the current relationships like with Time Warner I am betting Google will obide by all copyright laws and remove copyright violations even quicker now (say goodbye to the old days of watching Family Guy episodes on YouTube).

All said and done Google made an excellent purchase and the main motivating factor is to make money, I mean why else buy it right? You can expect to see exclusive Google adsense ads across YouTube now and watch for other changes Google makes in the coming months to try to monetize the Juggernaut we know as YouTube

Here is a great tool to check your sites.

Future PageRank Tool © SEO Chat™ URL Valid URL

As Google celebrates It’s 8th year It’s fun to look back on Google and how it all started.

Google is a play on the word googol, which was coined by Milton Sirotta, nephew of American mathematician Edward Kasner, and was popularized in the book, Mathematics and the Imagination by Kasner and James Newman. It refers to the number represented by the numeral 1 followed by 100 zeros. Google’s use of the term reflects the company’s mission to organize the immense, seemingly infinite amount of information available on the web.

For a complete history on the Big G take a look here

1. Capsized Cruise Ship Captured in Google Earth / Maps

2. KC-135 Caught Refueling C-5 Galaxy in Mid-Air in Google Earth!

3. Huge Scale Model of Disputed Border Region of China Found in Google Earth

4. Lancaster Bomber Caught Flying in Google Earth

5. Flying Car? Not Really

6. Nude Sunbather caught by google earth.

7. Firefox Crop Circle in Google Earth

8. Google Earth Las Vegas

9. Shipwrecks Around the Google Earth

10. See African Animals in High Resolution in Google Earth

If you havent yet been to Google Earth go check it out its very interesting. You can even see an overhead view of your own house.

“Gmail has an interesting quirk where you can add a plus sign (+) after your Gmail address, and it’ll still get to your inbox. It’s called plus-addressing, and it essentially gives you an unlimited number of e-mail addresses to play with. Here’s how it works: say your address is pinkyrocks@gmail.com, and you want to automatically label all work e-mails. Add a plus sign and a phrase to make it pinkyrocks+work@gmail.com and set up a filter to label it work (to access your filters go to Settings->Filters and create a filter for messages addressed to pinkyrocks+work@gmail.com. Then add the label work).

More real world examples:

Find out who is spamming you: Be sure to use plus-addressing for every form you fill out online and give each site a different plus address.

Example: You could use
pinkyrocks+nytimes@gmail.com for nytimes.com
pinkyrocks+freestuff@gmail.com for freestuff.com
Then you can tell which site has given your e-mail address to spammers, and automatically send them to the trash.”

All this news stems from Googles recent domain registration.

Domain Name: googlemastercard.com

Registrant:
Google Inc.
(DOM-1368027)
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway Mountain View
CA
94043 US