San Mateo, Calif.-based file-sharing website YouTube has quickly become the preferred service for the viral dissemination of everything from homemade videos to classic animation clips. Now it seems that popular Internet search engine Google is looking into acquiring the site for $1.6 billion, according to a report by the Wall Street Journal. The publication cites unnamed sources as neither Google nor YouTube has confirmed nor denied the rumor.
With the growing popularity of viral video, Google and other popular web destinations like fellow search page Yahoo have created their own portals for uploading and downloading streaming clips. Still, YouTube remains one of the most visited hosts and would certainly give Google a major leg-up on the competition and greatly increase ad revenue. In fact, YouTube is so popular that television execs are offering development deals to some of the site’s breakout stars.
This is not the first time word of a YouTube acquisition has made its way around the grapevine. While the entity has a lot to offer in the way of internet traffic, it also comes with baggage in the form of copyright infringement issues. While a lot of the videos featured on the site are user-generated, people are using the service to post footage from movies and TV shows without the consent of the rights holders. You may recall that in July of this year Ren and Stimpy creator John Kricfalusi got into a war of words with Warner Bros. when the studio forced YouTube to remove classic cartoon snippets that Kricfaluci uploaded to the site for use on his blog (johnkstuff.blogspot.com). It was reported at the time that Warner Bros. was considering a deal to put its own content on YouTube.
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