> [social] It was an important business that they weren't able to dominate (although to the extent that YouTube is a social media site, it's one of the most visited in the world).
Well, to be fair, Google hasn't invented YouTube (one wonders if they could've done that given their resources). Their genius was that they: a) recognized that $1.6B is peanuts for the site with this potential; b) had lots of data inflows and relatively little data outflows, which made symmetrical data channels underutilized, thus making YouTube's running costs close to zero.
> [social] It was an important business that they weren't able to dominate (although to the extent that YouTube is a social media site, it's one of the most visited in the world).
Well, to be fair, Google hasn't invented YouTube (one wonders if they could've done that given their resources). Their genius was that they: a) recognized that $1.6B is peanuts for the site with this potential; b) had lots of data inflows and relatively little data outflows, which made symmetrical data channels underutilized, thus making YouTube's running costs close to zero.