We'd Be Cracking Up Too

Instead of posting blog entries or press releases, YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, posted a video message about their acquisition by Google.

You'd be giddy too if someone gave you a billion and a half dollars! Me, I'd grab Benny and be half way to an island by now.

The video has been viewed 1,375,454 times, with more than 6,000 comments, including:

- Congratulations! I hear you are in the money now. Good for you guys. Please don't let our community be destroyed!
- Hmmmm, with that kind of money they could pay all the Nuke Techs in N. Korea to abandon their jobs.
- Google might be taking over the world...but at least they are great at it. Congratulations you guys...nice smiles.
- this fucking sucks, now its gonna cost money obviously to watch these vids
- Who wouldn't be happy, $1.65 billion...
- Bye-bye YouTube. I suppose now we'll see "Ads by Gooooogel" all over the friggin' place. And then you'll have to watch an ad before you can watch your iMovie flick. Not that I blame you for selling out for $750,000,000 each . . . . but it will never be the same now. Oh well, it was great while it lasted.

Chen recently said that anyone with a web cam and a computer can be a producer of video and get their message out and be seen by millions of people. He called it "as big a paradigm shift as the invention of the printing press" and said "this will have profound effects in ways we haven't even begun to explore."