Google is buying Youtube – the biggest online video sharing site, for $1.6 billion. But why would it want to? It already has Google Video

Get more market share

Youtube has between 40-45% market share of online video sharing. Google Video has nothing like that. So combining Google video and Youtube will mean that Google almost dominates the video sharing market.

Why pay for advertising?

Google paid $900 million in a deal with Myspace to sell advertising space there. By buying youtube it can put all the ads it wants – and keep all the profits. At the moment Google adsense ads are on Youtube, but Youtube currently will get 70-80% of the profits. Now that Youtube is Google’s, the big G can keep 100% of the profits itself.

The lawsuits

Many people recon the reason Youtube hasn’t been sued yet is because they have no money to pay out. But then, Google video has lots of copyrighted material, and Google has lotsof money – but where are the lawsuits against them?

And hey, this is Google – the guys that decided they would scan thousands of books and display (parts of) them online! And they got away with it!

Also some big name companies such as Warner music have already done deals with youtube. Rather than keep setting lawsuits against each other etc they work with each other.

Found on Google Inside that Google are to launch a Click to Call service on Adwords.

On Search Engine Round Table they show what happens when a user clicks that ad.

I can see this possibly (and I stress, possibly) having a few major effects:

• People clicking it just to see what the icon means, but not interested in the sponsor (although the sponsor probably won’t get charged unless a valid number is entered)
• People doing the above, but enter false numbers
• People playing pranks on their friends (by entering their number, so they get calls from random companies)
• Or maybe people actually do want a call back.

How would you feel if you were looking at a web page, your phone goes off and you see an advert about an answering machine? Then you are watching the Simpsons on TV while browsing, and you get an ad on a page about a Simpsons DVD? You might think that would never happen, or perhaps you are just (un)lucky? But no, Google is going to start something like this…

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It has taken Yahoo months to integrate Flickr into their web search. But they have finally done it. It makes sense to do so. The only reason I can see why they waited all this time was for a bit of publicity. Take a look at a sample search. Not all “[keyword] photos” use Flickr results though, many still just show “Image Search Results” (search for “cat photos”).