On Monday Google announced the acquisition of YouTube for $1.65bn.

The acquisition combines one of the largest and fastest growing online video entertainment communities with Google’s expertise in organizing information and creating new models for advertising on the Internet. The combined companies will focus on providing a better, more comprehensive experience for users interested in uploading, watching and sharing videos, and will offer new opportunities for professional content owners to distribute their work to reach a vast new audience.

Co-founders Chad and Steve shared the news with the YouTube community here.

They joined Eric Schmidt, Sergey Brin and David Drummond to announce the deal.

The vision about serving their end users was exactly the same as Larry and Sergey’s vision in founding Google. We believe the combination of Google and YouTube will create this very new and interesting global media platform for users, content providers and advertisers all around the world.

A transcript of the conference call is available here.

Matt Richtel tells how Sequoia Capital’s $11.5m investment hit the jackpot.

Sequoia, which is among the most successful venture firms in Silicon Valley, invested a total of $11.5 million in YouTube from November 2005 to April 2006. It may be walking away with more than 43 times that amount. Its stake in YouTube has been estimated at roughly 30 percent, which would give it a value of $495 million.

Commentary on the deal from around the Web is available here.

Tom Green tells the untold story of the rise of flash video.

QuickTime, Windows Media, and Real essentially lost the market when they got blind-sided by the growth of the web, fast internet connections, and, in many respects, the “Standards Movement.” At the same time that practically everyone had gotten an internet connection and the cost of bandwidth to the consumer was plummeting, the web standards movement led by Jeff Zeldman, Molly Hozschlag and Eric Meyer started taking hold and web designers and developers began to look at the web page as a space they controlled. Content went where they said content should be and that was the end of that discussion.

The natural evolution of the Web from text to images to video continues.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 11th, 2006 at 11:38 am and is filed under Acquisition, Venture Capital, Internet, Strategic Thinking, Conversation, Digital Identity, Creativity, Media, Search, Advertising, Marketing Services, Lifetime learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.