A week after Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) paid $1.65 billion to acquire YouTube, the dust is still settling. Music labels and Hollywood studios are still eyeing the deal to figure out whether they should sue YouTube or partner with it in revenue-sharing arrangements.
We do know that neither Google nor YouTube walked away as the immediate winner. That distinction would have to go to Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment. What does a specialist in tube, pipe, and coil processing have to do with this deal? Well, it happens to live on the Web at UTube.com. According to Alexa.com, UTube.com's traffic surged 440% higher this past week.
It's easy to see what happened. A lot of folks who had never heard of YouTube got wind of the Google deal and decided to check it out based on what they heard, not what they read. With eBay (NASDAQ:EBAY) and iTunes setting the opening-vowel trend, it only made sense to an unsophisticated old-school audience to type in UTube.com. They must have been aghast to find Google getting into industrial equipment!
In the meantime, Google may want to check into acquiring that domain. Google already blew it by naming its publisher ad network AdSense without first obtaining the AdSense.com domain from AdSense Consulting.
While we're still on a lighter note, I figured that it would be a hoot to visualize what the comments page would look like if dot-com companies were posting on the actual deal between Google and YouTube.
- Google: First!
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Viacom (NYSE:VIA): First? Drats! Not first. Again.
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Yahoo! (NASDAQ:YHOO): Oh, criminy. That Zuckerberg kid at Facebook is going to really try to milk us dry now. Thanks a lot, Google.
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Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT): Lovely. Now we're going to have to delay Windows Vista for a few more weeks to include a video-sharing desktop application. The EU is not going to like this one bit.
- Viacom: Really, YouTube? Are you serious? Tell me you have a cute cousin or a younger sister that I can ask out. Please.
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CBS (NYSE:CBS): Oh, so this is where everyone is hanging out when we're broadcasting Survivor this season. Be careful, though. We have CSI: Des Moines and CSI: Buffalo ready to roll as midseason replacements if we need 'em.
- eBay: No one has figured out that folks can skirt auction-listing fees on our site by simply trying to offer up their wares -- with video -- through your site yet, right? Whew! . Wait a minute! Did I just let the cat out of the bag? Google doesn't really want to take us on in the auctions space, too, right?
Oh, that Google. It's always crashing everyone else's party.
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Longtime Fool contributor Rick Munarriz isn't a YouTube junkie, but he does find himself on the site more often than he would care to admit. He does not own shares in any of the companies in this story. The Fool has a disclosure policy.
