Another day, more rumours ("totally unsubstantiated", mind you) that YouTube is going to be purchase for a kazillion dollars. Let's just auction the damn thing on eBay and auction it off so we can finally kill this weird YouTube obsession. There, I feel much better now. Update: Om Malik said dismissed the prospects of a YouTube-Google deal, suggesting "it has as much chance of happening as me dropping 40 pounds". In his typical pragmatic approach to rumours and speculation, Paul Kedrosky opines that "the blogosphere has predicted nine of the last three Google acquisitions, so skepticism is highly warranted".
Update: ComScore has some food for thought about the Google-YouTube speculation. For example, the number of unique U.S. visitors in August:
Yahoo! Video 21,141 MySpace Videos 19,406 YouTube 19,089 MSN Video 15,414 Google Video Search 11,891
And % of U.S. video streams in August:
Yahoo! Sites 11.3% MySpace 20.3% YouTube 9.0% Microsoft Sites 2.2% Google Sites 0.8%