A few days back, Sony bought a non-revenue generating YouTube clone called Grouper for an impressive 65 million dollars. Then I said if it is going to boost YouTube’s value if and when it goes for sale.
Now YouTube, which had been thinking for sometime now to go under the hammer seems to have taken notice of it. YouTube apparently thinks that it is worth much more than the $1 billion that many pundits were estimating.
NYPost reports that YouTube is not going to sell itself for less than $1.5 billion. However, who is going to pay that price for YouTube is another story.
Anyway, citing the Sony-Grouper deal Mashable says that these days companies seem to be interested in the technology than success on the consumer side and YouTube has both the tech and the user-base. Therefore, it can seriously hope to sell out for 3 times as much as MySpace sold. In my opinion, Yahoo! and AOL are the companies that are more likely to buy YouTube than say Disney that many people are also counting upon. Yahoo! has a precedent of buying popular Web 2.0 cos like Flickr.
What do you say?
