In the wake of the recent GooTube
deal, there have been lots of ramblings—both positive
and negative—going on about it in the blogosphere and media. So if you can’t
get over it yet, or just haven’t got enough of it, here are some reactions, thoughts,
and comments on the matter…

Firstly, there were plenty
of different reactions, including YouTube’s co-founders, Chen and Hurley, who
published this shiny, happy, video (I guess
you’d sound like you were high as well if you just got $1.65B of Google’s
money):

And here are some other
reactions:

Jeff Pulver—YouTube comes from a place where it knows about community;
how to build community, and how to enable end-users within its community to
share videos and common experiences. I wonder how much of this “community
experience” will transfer over to the culture within Google.

John Battelle—I am mixed on this. I
think it's wise to frame this as “the companies will stay separate”
kind of acquisition, even if in the end that's not the intent. But this marks
Google's first significant “out of brand” acquisition, the company's
first true brand-management challenge. I'm not counting Blogger in here
because, well, it wasn't this big.

Steve Bryant (eWeek)—
Not that Google is
beholden to reveal its plans on a conference call. But when you justify your
company's largest purchase ever with 1) “It was a good cultural fit,”
and 2) We have “20-30 ideas,” and then don't reveal how you came to
the $1.6 billion valuation, it leaves some questions unanswered.

Om Malik—
Winners:

1.       Sequoia Capital, which invested about $11.5 million⁴
in two rounds and owned 30% of the company, which translates to about $495
million. via who else, Dr. Kedrosky⁵.

2.       Steve, Chad, and Jawed -
the three co-founders of You Tube, who must be walking away with at least $200
million each. They own close to 50% of the company

3.       Facebook, because now we
can expect a knee jerk reaction from someone, probably Yahoo.

4.       Ferrari dealerships, cat
litter companies and of course, the real estate brokers.

5.       Litigation lawyers

6.       Michael Arrington

7.       MC Hammer, who visited
both Google and YouTube last year. Or as he sings – Can’t touch this!

Losers:

1.       Yahoo, which is now going
to make a move, well that is a move.

2.       Mark Cuban

3.       Me

4.       Google, because I think
this is Compaq-DEC, Skype-eBay kind of a deal for them in the long run

However, now that the
reality of the deal has finally sunk in, we’re seeing a change in the tone of
conversations. Firstly, there are the “where’s the web (2.0) going”
type of questions, like Don Dodge’s and Robert Scoble’s “Is Facebook
Worth more than YouTube”, as well as interesting analyses on trends and
bubbles (see “No Bublble 2.0 Yet”), like
this table of significant acquisitions since 2003:

However, it appears that
the conversations have now turned slightly uglier, as YouTubers start to ponder on the implications
and others have started discussing the possibility of lawsuits and DRM. And of course, no sooner had
these nasty words been uttered, than we are hearing rumblings of “SueTube”, as Time Warner plans to “…pursue its copyright complaints against the video sharing
site YouTube.com” (see comments by Don Dodge).

In the end, after all that’s
been said and done, I think Steve Rubel has the right idea
about the whole thing (unless you’re a Google/YouTube competitor, of course).
Here’s what he says…

Google finally bought
YouTube. Maybe now we can all stop focusing on minutia M&A stuff and focus
on bigger, meatier issues like where social media is all going and what it
means. I am reluctant to even link to this because it's been written about to
death. It's a deal. Now it's done. Woo hoo. Good for Google. Good for YouTube.
Great for social media. Even better for the blogopshere because we won't be
talking about this much longer.

And on that note, that’s
probably the last you’ll hear from me on this topic folks…That is, unless
something really significant happens in this space some time down the road, of
course…