$1.65 Billion

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Google, the Internet's leading search engine, announced Monday that it is buying popular online video site YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock.
YouTube, which was founded in February 2005, has quickly become the most well-known of several online video sites. More than 100 million videos, many of which are short videos created by the site's users, are downloaded a day on the site.

According to Internet research firm Hitwise, YouTube has about a 46 percent share of the online video market. For Google (Charts), the purchase of YouTube gives the company the ability to tap into the potentially lucrative online video and social networking markets. Some analysts have criticized Google for relying too much on advertising tied to keyword searches. The combination of Google and YouTube could further strengthen Google's dominance in online advertising, giving it an edge over rivals such as Yahoo! (Charts), Microsoft's (Charts) MSN and News Corp (Charts)., which owns the social networking site MySpace. Some analysts said Monday that Yahoo, Microsoft and News Corp. also had probably expressed interest in buying YouTube.
Bill Tancer, general manger of global research of Hitwise, said after the deal was announced that MySpace would now probably need to promote its own video service more aggressively on its site in order to compete with a combined Google-YouTube.

taken from Paul R. La Monica, CNNMoney.com editor at large

Read more:http://money.cnn.com/2006/10/09/technology/googleyoutube_deal/index.htm