Mon 9 Oct 2006
Mark Cuban vs. Google
Posted by Steve under Misc
Well, things certainly got interesting today. A couple of weeks ago Mark Cuban said that:
Today Google went ahead and bought YouTube for $1.65 billion. Cuban had some thoughts on it last week before the deal went through, but it will be interesting to see what he has to say now.
It will also be interesting to see who is proven right. Did Google make a good purchase? Or is Mark Cuban right and they just flushed $1.65 billion down the toilet? We shall see.
Update: Mark Cuban - I still think Google is crazy 
October 10th, 2006 at 7:09 am
I don’t think Google are crazy. I am sure they negotiated pretty hard, but in this current market where there is a lot of money floating around, they probably couldn’t have paid much less.
Like one of the comments on Cuban’s blog, video is not like music. I don’t think you find full movies/tv shows on YT.
The studios and production companies probably enjoy the publicity which youtube gives them. The reason why they haven’t sued them is that they want to be there and to have their videos watched by millions.
They will just be asking for their share of advertising revenue where it is due.
October 10th, 2006 at 7:20 am
Yeah, I tend to trust Google knows what they’re doing when it would come to something like this. And to be quite honest, even if it ends up being a goof by Google, it’s a relatively small goof considering their current market cap.
October 10th, 2006 at 6:02 pm
I don’t think Google is crazy; they’re purchasing the user base rather than the technology. I think they overpaid for the property but it’s hard to put a solid valuation on a site/technology that gets hundreds of thousands of downloads a day. I think that if anyone is likely to turn YouTube into a money maker it’ll be Google. Not to mention if anyone actually needs to have a big bankroll to keep them alive until they become profitable Google thas that clout.
As for Mark Cuban’s comments: Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft were all in the bidding for YouTube. None of those companies are known for making costly mistakes. Does he know something these three didn’t?