The Whole World is Watching YouTube Being Bought by Google
The street, that is Wall Street and the web were buzzing over the 1.65 billion dollar purchase by Google of You Tube on Monday.
Co-founders, Chad Hurley, 29 and Steven Chen, 27, started You Tube in February 2005 out of a proverbial garage in San Mateo California after realizing how hard it was to share videos they took at a party. Their site currently has an audience watching upwards of 40 million videos per day.
Chad Hurley, left, and Steven Chen
(AP/Tony Avelar, File)
A few weeks ago You Tube started removing dozens of videos from its archives and suspending the accounts of some users who have posted them, a reaction, it said, to complaints from other users. The Conservative Blogoshpere, led by Michelle Malkin at michellemalkin.com pointed out that it was mostly anti-jihad videos that were pulled from You Tube (here).
Left untouched are hundreds of anti-west videos, many in Arabic, pro-Hezbollah, pro-Al Queda even videos purportedly of U.S. soldiers being killed in Iraq.
It remains to be seen if this very one sided form of censorship will continue after Google’s purchase closes. We’ll all be watching You Tube closely.
great concept!