"Google is, in effect, paying YouTube consumers to visit the site..."

Ouch! I never understood this acquisition. Google didn't have any experience with video sites. YT itself didn't have a successful business model before Google bought it (that Google could continue). And Google didn't even run tests on a video site before they bought it... to be convinced they could make money off it.

You can't buy something as big as YouTube with its extreme daily costs unless you have a solid plan from Day 1 to make good revenue. A billion dollars on a pipe dream is bizarre.

Twitter is the new YouTube, as far as I'm concerned. It's a highly popular website which doesn't even have a proven revenue track record. Nobody knows when or even if it can make great money. Yet Google is talking about buying it!?

Google should probably sell YouTube, but who would buy it?

p/g

You know an easy solution to narrowing the gap on the profit and loss on youtube would be to charge each video uploaded $1.00.
This would do two things stop all the garbage and increase the video quality uploaded.

Twitter is the new something for sure but I have a sneaking feeling wordpress, and the newly aquired wp.com domain name, have even more potential especially with an army of coders to put it together.

What I can't stomach about youtube are all the 12 year olds trying to make themselves into a personality (when they don't have one yet). Google is doing us all a favor by keeping them glued to Youtube, image webmasterworld with the same comments....

Was the acquisition a brand building exercise? I mean with the amount of people that visit YouTube they could drill the name Google into all the 10 year olds that are using it and will use it when they start using computers more often.

Sort of like the way McDs gives toys to kids so all the kids grow up to like McDs?

No real point but food for thought.

i don't know why they don't just populate the right sidebar of yt search results with search targeted video ads? i see text ads for some queries but not for others. or i'll just see one un-targeted video ad @ the foot of a number of promoted videos on the right;

they should build an adwords-like interface strictly for video ads; and allow people to submit a transcript that could be used to associate the video ads with keyword queries.