What do you get for $1.65 billion? When Google paid that much for YouTube in 2006, CEO Eric Schmidt wasn't expecting it to become the setup for a punch line. When he first visited YouTube, he told employees at the video-sharing site to focus on attracting users and not to worry about revenues. That was then. "Forget I said that," he recently told YouTubers. The site is generating 1 billion video views a day, cofounder Chad Hurley has said, but efforts to place "overlay" ads on those clips haven't taken off yet. YouTube's new mission: Make money. And fast.
Eric Schmidt puts the screws on YouTube
4:40 PM on Tue Mar 18 2008
By Owen Thomas
1,425 views
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