YouTube IPO Soon?

Posted Sep 5th 2006 1:10PM by Tom Taulli
Filed under: Rumors, Google (GOOG), Yahoo! (YHOO)

Not since Google has there been a really hot IPO. But maybe investors will get a second chance with an offering from YouTube?

After all, YouTube's investor, Sequoia Capital, was also an early investor in Google. This VC firm is not about making a great returns on its investments; rather, it wants to make blow-out returns.

And YouTube could be such an opportunity.

Over the weekend the Wall Street Journal reported that YouTube hired Yahoo's Treasurer, Gideon Yu, to take the role as the CFO. No doubt this is a critical role for a high-flier IPO.

In fact, over the past few months, YouTube has been staging a talent raid of Yahoo. The company hired away such names as Rob Solomon, Yahoo's vice president of online shopping, and Tony Nethercutt, Yahoo's National Sales Director.

True, YouTube is still young (less than two years old). Yet the company has become a global media powerhouse. Given the Tsunami of advertising money flooding into the online world, YouTube is likely to ramp up revenues. It's something that should be easy, given that the company gets more than 100 million video views per day and has a market share in excess of 40%, beating out online veterans as well as traditional media companies.

Tom Taulli is the author of various books, including the Complete M&A Handbook and operates InvestorOffering.com.

Tags: Google, IPO, Yahoo, YouTube

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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

9-05-2006 @ 1:59PM

Jason said...

"It's something that should be easy, given that the company gets more than 100 million video views per day and has a market share in excess of 40%, beating out online veterans as well as traditional media companies."

It is not going to be easy at all.

1. Advertisers do not want to be in front of unqualified video (i.e. user generated or stolen).

2. Once they start selling advertising against stolen video they are going to have lots of legal issues. The big reason they haven't been rocked with lawsuits is that they don't have ads.

This is going to be theglobe.com all over again... it's a total scam.

9-05-2006 @ 7:39PM

Randall said...

Advertising is not the only viable revenue stream for YouTube. Like MySpace before it YouTube has quickly built a fantastic brand that draws in a 100 million eyeballs each day (well, 200 million if each person has two) “Content is King”? If they let the viral videos bring viewers to the site and then license content that has ancillary value they can grow their own brand of entertainment. There could be Bit’s of YouTube on websites throughout the web.