But Google’s decision to take on YouTube’s burden seemed downright crazy to a lot of people. Wasn’t Google paying a lot of money to basically assume a huge liability risk? It turned out that Google made one simple calculation when it purchased YouTube: in the broadband era, video was likely to become as ubiquitous on the web as text and pictures had always been. YouTube was already, in essence, the world’s largest search engine for video. In fact, it would eventually become the second-most-used search engine, period. With its stated mission to organize all the world’s information, Google
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