OPEN

Following feverish buzz around video sharing community YouTube at a Californian new media networking event the press story is that the founder are now touting it for sale at $1 billion.

That’s a bit rich for the tastes of some people – and understandably so.

What could happen is that old media execs panicked by falling audience figures and the need to be seen to "get" Web 2.0 may push the price up by bidding against one another. Think 3G licence bidding by mobile networks for how insane the figures can get when too many people chase a "must have".

YouTube is a great company and a great service, but I’m not sure that the audience / community is as nearly tied to it as MySpace (your personal network lives there, you’ve invested time in it) or even Skype (you have a Skype number and people use it to speak to you).

If I were a media exec thinking of buying it I might be tempted to think how a couple of hundred million could build the exact same thing for me. But then unless I really understood how content distribution works in networks I would probably also start thinking of clumsy ways to monetise the thing and tie people in and things that would ultimately make it a failure and make me wish I’d outbid Viacom (or whoever) by an extra billion in the long run.

: : Oh yeah – looks like Skype and Kazaa are happy to try and build their own – under the codename "The Venice Projct" – according to paidcontent.org.