I've actually long thought that Google's YouTube acquisition wasn't purely to get into the online video market. It was all about the huge corpus of video that

I've actually long thought that Google's YouTube acquisition wasn't purely to get into the online video market. It was all about the huge corpus of video that they acquired. Let me explain. Google's general game plan is this: massive compute clusters + massive datasets + Phd CS brains trying to do something cool. My bet is that Google thought that having the world's largest video dataset was well worth the $2.5 billion they spent to buy YouTube. It's still worth $0.5 billion a year for them to keep maintaining it. I don't think that they are going to be panicking about monetizing YouTube any time soon. That's not the reason they bought the company.