youtube - Internet Marketing News and Blogs

When a YouTube clip featuring London-based PR firm Borkowski moving offices achieved over 10,000 views, you would be forgiven for thinking that it was a canny piece of marketing by the company.

Not so, apparently. PR Blogger.com reports that the PR firm denies posting the Benny Hill-style clip on YouTube.

Online video advertising is seeing rapid growth at the moment, with spending increasing by 83% from last year, according to eMarketer.

US online video ad spending will reach $410 million this year, compared with around $74 million in 2005, says the US-based firm. Spending is predicted to rise to almost $3 billion by 2010.

An American tubes and pipes manufacturer whose website is registered at utube.com is suing YouTube after being deluged with traffic from millions of users mistakenly seeking the video sharing network.

Universal Tube and Rollform Equipment Corporation said the cost of hosting utube.com had skyrocketed in the last couple of months thanks to the word-of-mouth popularity of youtube.com.

Michael Arrington reports that Myspace is set to clamp down on copyright infringement through a deal with digital entertainment company Gracenote .

Internet startup Travelistic.com - which aims to be the YouTube for travellers - launched yesterday, headed up by one-time CEO and president of MTVi. 

Travelistic combines user-generated video with professionally produced programming, some of which is exclusive. The self-funded company itself plans to move into content creation, with a travel-themed 'video podcast' in the offing.

Diversion Media built the website using Ruby on Rails, harnessing the Google Maps API in the process to make it easy for users to browse videos by location, in a visual way. Users can also search for videos by tags.

All in all it looks pretty good. We spoke to CEO Nicholas Butterworth to find out a bit more...

Pure Digital Technologies has introduced a new, pocket sized camcorder which will allow videos to be uploaded to sites such as Google Video (but not YouTube, for some reason) within seconds.

The Pure Digital Point & Shoot Camcorder is currently available in the US for $129.99 (around £70) and features 30 minutes of storage capacity, with a 60 minute version also available.

After paying $1.6bn for the world's favourite video sharing site this week, Google could be facing copyright problems over some of the site's video content, as content owners take advantage of the search engine giant's deeper pockets.

Media group Time Warner has indicated that it will be pursuing its copyright claims against YouTube with its new owners, and other companies may well choose to follow suit.

So we know that YouTube is being bought by Google, for a whopping $1.65bn, but what did the Google founders have to say about the YouTube acquisition?

Read choice snippets from today's conference call after the jump...

Google is to acquire YouTube for $1.65bn in an all-stock deal, in a move that may spark a flurry of M&A activity across the internet sector.

YouTube will remain a distinct, standalone brand, with the founders and all 67 employees remaining with the company.

Michael Arrington has reported a rumour that Google “may be in the final stages” of a US$1.6 billion deal for video sharing behemoth YouTube.

If the rumour is true and the deal goes through it could be another coup for Google, though it might yet turn out to be a big headache for the search giant, as YouTube has some significant issues with regards to copyright and content control.

Nonetheless, YouTube is now a real A-list website among the world's internet users and surely it is just a matter of time before the founders accept an offer. The mooted valuation reflects the company's meteoric growth.

Google, for obvious reasons, told us that it couldn't comment on the rumour either way, as is company policy. YouTube is being reported as keeping schtum too.