AFI BLOG: Media and Technology

Forbes

Google is turning YouTube into its own kind of data gold mine. So what if a few founding employees wind up in the dust?

Google drew sneers when it paid $1.65 billion for YouTube in November 2006. Only 63 people worked at this little video distributor in San Bruno, Calif. It had minimal revenue but more clips, bigger buzz and a better user experience than Google.

Sneer no more. YouTube is bigger than ever. The Google people are taking over the place, and they’ve found the buttons on the cash register–vindication for YouTube’s original crew, especially founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. Or, rather, partial vindication, since the original managers have been largely replaced by Google apparatchiks.

The three-year-old YouTube site probably crossed a billion views per day worldwide a few months ago, exceeding even the lofty expectations by Google when it made the acquisition. (YouTube will only confirm it does hundreds of millions of views per day.) Thirty-eight percent of the video streamed on the Web now comes from YouTube, according to ComScore (nasdaq: SCOR - news - people ). No other player has more than 4%. Google owns the biggest television station on the planet. It will upload 600 years’ worth of video this year.

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