Google Purchases YouTube for $1.65 Billion

Google grabs YouTube for $1.65 Billion

Google has once again made a clutch offensive move in the Internet advertising world by purchasing the hugely popular video streaming site YouTube. Google is purchasing YouTube for $1.65 billion, making it easily the largest investment the company has ever made. YouTube is a social site which allows members to upload and share personal videos. The site has become immensely popular with now over 70 million online viewers. A surprising outcome from this transaction is the fact that even with Google’s huge bid of $1.65 billion for the company; YouTube is still an unprofitable company. Most of the videos hosted on YouTube are home movies, but there is still a handful of copyrighted material that pops up from time to time. This has caused much criticism on YouTube’s behalf, with many people comparing the company to the original Napster.

However, Google was obviously not worried about the potential lawsuits. Before this purchase, Google has been trying to promote their own video site know as Google Videos, but they have not been nearly as successful as YouTube in this market. Google obviously realized that they could not compete with YouTube, so they turned to the next best option; buying them up. Google is thinking about the future of online advertising with this move. They will once again revolutionize the online advertising market by offering rich streaming media for advertisers, as television advertising looses its appeal.

This spells nothing but trouble for Google’s competitors, like Yahoo, who have relied on many other business models other than advertising to produce profits since Google has been dominating this market for the past couple years. This was a brilliant move for Google in my opinion. With control of a site as popular as YouTube, Google is certainly going to be able to provide an unmatchable advertising product. Google’s stock value may still be over-inflated, but I think that they are moving in the right direction, so their true trade value will probably remain fairly high. As the Internet becomes more of a staple for the advertising world, Google will certainly be in the forefront for a long time to come. I am very interested in finding out what Google has planned next in their quest to conquer the Internet advertising world.

vFlyer to Offer Free Online Flyer Service

Internet Startup offers Free Online Classified Advertisements to Sellers

The brand new Internet startup company known as vFlyer is in the beta phase of offering its new service for creating free online classified advertisements. This company, which is based in San Francisco, is offering a unique and original service for sellers on the Internet. Their service allows advertisers to create a unique single page classified flyer that can be used for selling pretty much any good or service. The obvious products would be automobiles and real estate, but their service has a seemingly unlimited set of uses. The best thing about vFlyer’s classified ads, which you can create from 30 professional designs, is that they are completely free.

When the site goes live, anyone can become a member and start creating these classified flyers. When you have created an ad with vFlyer’s software, you will be able to export the page into raw HTML code that can be embedded into a website, or any online classified marketplace, such as Craigslist. vFlyer will take care of posting your classified advertisement to all the major classified search engines, like eBay, Google Base, and Oodle.

vFlyer is also going to be offering many other ways that you can promote your flyer. Their software will allow you to save the page to your computer, forward it to a friend, or even send to a printing company to print real flyers. Users can also embed the flyers into an email and send mass mails for marketing. The service will initially be offered completely for free, but vFlyer is planning on offering a subscription based service for large marketers. Their paid subscribers, and also online ads embedded into users flyers will generate most of the revenues for the company according to Oliver Muoto, co-founder of vFlyer.

Their philosophy is somewhat different that other marketing services. Instead of providing the hosting of the flyers, they are simply providing a service that will allow sellers to create the flyer. The seller can then use the flyer with whatever service they want, from being hosted by Google to being printed and posted on the streets. I think this business model is original and I am confident that this company will do well. I know for a fact that there is a huge demand for a service just like this, and vFlyer will offer the service that online marketers demand. I believe that this business will take off for vFlyer when they finally go live. I am interested in signing up when this service is eventually offered. I am sure that others will be too.