Yahoo exec takes a swipe at 'crazy price' Google paid for YouTube
It didn't help that Google was on the same platform at a California conference when Mr M launched his broadside
Google paid a crazy price for YouTube at $1.6 billion in 2006 and the price is "still crazy" said Yahoo 's man in charge of corporate development, Steven Mitzenmacher, speaking on a panel at the Global Technology Symposium in Menlo Park,California.
Sitting next to him, Google’s Neeraj Arora strongly disagreed. YouTube “has paid itself back,” he insisted.
Mr. Mitzenmacher then pulled out a mobile phone to check on a report last year which quoted Google's soon-to-depart CEO Eric Schmidt saying YouTube wasn’t yet profitable. Fans uploaded 35 hours of video to the site every minute, making it really costly to maintain.
Mitzenmacher didn't find many backers. Robby Kwok of LinkedIn, formerly of Yahoo, called the YouTube purchase a “great deal,” and added ,“You can’t deny they’ve done a really good job with it.”
YouTube had 500 million unique visitors in January, making it the No. 3 site on the Web. Yahoo was No. 4 with 400 million.
Mitzenmacher said his own company had gone through a couple of years where acquisitions weren’t on the agenda. Yahoo have made only a few buys including web content Associated Content for $100 million last May.
But things were about to change at Yahoo. "We’ve come out now…guns blazing,” he added. Google made 48 acquisitions in 2010 .