Google was the savior Napster never had. It had the infrastructure to allow YouTube to scale up; it had the technical sophistication to keep YouTube on the right side of the law; it had the money to contest the legal battles; and—most important—it provided YouTube with the business model that would allow it to thrive. Those little text ads that Google had put all over the Internet? They could be used to monetize the videos on YouTube just as they could with any other type of content. As the years went by, the text ads could even morph into actual video ads—but algorithmically targeted and
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