YouTube Creators Split $650 Million
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The two co-founders behind YouTube received Google stock valued at about $650 million, according to a regulatory filing made with the US Securities and Exchange Commission Wednesday, while Sequoia Capital, the VC firm that backed YouTube walked away with around $450 million.
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(InfoWorld) - Media company Viacom said on Tuesday that it was filing suit against Google Inc. for what it alleges are "massive intentional copyright infringement" of Viacomâs property. Viacom is seeking more than $1 billion in damages and asking the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York to place an injunction on Google and to prevent the company from sharing around 160,000 unauthorized video clips on the company's YouTube video sharing site, Viacom said in a statement. Google was not immediately available for comment. Viacom, which owns popular brands including MTV, Comedy Central, VH1 and Nickelodeon, said its programming had been viewed more than 1.5 billion times on YouTube, the video sharing site that Google purchased in October, 2006, for $1.6 billion. âYouTube is a significant, for-profit organization that has built a lucrative business out of exploiting the devotion of fans to othersâ creative works in order to enrich itself and its corporate parent Google," Viacom said in a statement.Â  "Their business model, which is based on building traffic and selling advertising off of unlicensed content, is clearly illegal and is in obvious conflict with copyright laws." The suit by Viacom follows a notice from Viacom in February, 2007 under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) to remove its videos from YouTube. Viacom alleges that Google does little to police copyright violations on YouTube. "This behavior stands in stark contrast to the actions of other significant distributors, who have recognized the fair value of entertainment content and have concluded agreements to make content legally available to their customers around the world," the company said. Shortly after buying YouTube in October, Google struck deals with Sony BMG Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group to offer music videos on YouTube and share advertising revenue. The company also negotiated with Viacom on a similar deal, but Viacom claims those negotiations were unproductive and that Google is following an "unlawful business model." "Therefore, we must turn to the courts to prevent Google and YouTube from continuing to steal value from artists and to obtain compensation for the significant damage they have caused," Viacom said.
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The biggest windfalls went to YouTubeâs three founders and its main financial backer, Sequoia Capital.
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DAVOS, Switzerland -- Chad Hurley, co-founder of YouTube, said Saturday that his site will start sharing revenue with its millions of users.
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YouTube announced deals that will provide its users with more legitimate music video and professional basketball content.
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By Associated Press  Unshaken by its legal problems in the United States, online video leader YouTube.com will attempt to extend its cultural reach and increase its moneymaking opportunities by programming new channels in nine other countries.
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Apple has liberated YouTube from the computer, on big and small screens. The company&#39;s elegantly simple Apple TV set-top box ($299 for 50-hour video version; $399 for 200 hours) lets you stream YouTube videos to big-screen TVs wirelessly over a home network. Plus, YouTube is a featured application on the $499 and $599 iPhones.
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UK contributors to YouTube will get the chance to earn money from advertisements.
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SAN FRANCISCO At the Web 2.0 conference here in 2005 -- back before Google had paid $1.65 billion for YouTube and people were talking about valuations for Facebook of $15 billion -- Zach Coelius, a precocious 25-year-old who had snuck into the hall without paying, stepped up to the microphone and...
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It's just Grouper regrouped Comment You may have heard that Sony has renamed the Grouper user generated website that it bought a while back for some $65m, as Crackle, and begun trying to drag its content into the professional zone by putting up minor amounts of content that Sony owns to make the professional level of the site stronger than, say, YouTube.â¦
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In the few months since Google paid $1.65 billion to acquire YouTube, both companies have tried to come up with a formula to turn the hugely popular online video site into a moneymaking venture.
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YouTube Video &#038; Usage Facts There&#8217;s an interesting article in the WSJ (sub req&#8217;d) on YouTube, with some data and metrics, by Lee Gomes today: I did a scrape of YouTube a month ago and found there were 5.1 million videos. By Sunday, the end of another scrape, that number had grown by about 20% to 6.1 [...]
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Unshaken by its legal problems in the United States, online video leader YouTube will attempt to extend its cultural reach and increase its moneymaking opportunities by programming new channels in nine other countries.
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A YouTube deal with the British society that collects royalties for composers, songwriters and publishers means artists will be paid for tracks used to back clips on the video-sharing website. The agreement will also give YouTube a defense when media companies holler "piracy."
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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. -- The investors and founders of online video Web site YouTube received hundreds of millions of dollars in Google shares as a result of the deal between the two companies late last year, according to new documents.
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(InfoWorld) - Google Inc. is in discussions to acquire YouTube Inc. for about US$1.6 billion, although the deal is far from done and the talks could collapse, The Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, citing an unnamed source familiar with the matter. Google's reported interest in YouTube would reflect a sense of urgency on the part of the search engine giant to improve its position in the red-hot online video market. Google entered the market in early 2005, at about the same time YouTube was founded. But so far the success has gone to the scrappy startup, not Google. In September, YouTube nabbed almost 46 percent of all U.S. visits to video Web sites, while the video section of News Corp.'s MySpace.comÂ came in second with 21.2 percent, according to Hitwise Pty. Ltd. Google Video came in third with 11 percent, followed by Microsoft Corp.'s MSN Video with 6.8 percent and Yahoo Inc.'s Yahoo Video with 5.6 percent. YouTube, in typical startup fashion, approached the market aggressively, opening up their service to anyone wanting to upload their videos, and quickly became a phenomenon. It embraced tagging and sharing features, creating the most popular online video community. Meanwhile, Google took a much more conservative approach, at first only featuring videos obtained through formal agreements with professional production houses. Consequently, users had to pay to view many of the videos in the catalogue. Months later, it added an upload feature for regular users, but closely policed submissions. It wasn't until recently that it opened wide the service's door and added tagging and sharing capabilities. Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL LLC are also playing catch-up to YouTube, whose model these large Internet companies are adopting. Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL need a strong position in this market, due to the increasing popularity of online video. Collectively, traffic to the top 10 video Web sites increased 164 percent between February and May of this year, according to Hitwise. As traffic to online video sites increases, so does the interest of advertisers, who in turn generate most of the revenue for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and AOL. For many years, online video remained an unfulfilled promise, hobbled by high broadband prices, inferior image quality and reluctance by TV networks and film companies to put their shows and movies on the Web. However, in the past 18 months, video on the Web has gained momentum, helped by a critical mass of users with broadband access, improved quality and a willingness by production companies to distribute their films and programs online. Neither Google nor YouTube immediately responded to requests for comment.
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LOS ANGELES  - An animated series is redrawing the lines of television mega-deals. The eye-popping $75 million pact announced Monday by Comedy Central and the creators of "South Park" may be the most prominent example of the Internet as a bona fide backend window alongside syndication and DVD. The duo of Matt Stone and Trey Parker will get a 50-50 ad split on digital platforms but not on television.