while 1.65 billion sounds like an awful lot of money (especially considering youtube was started in a garage just a year and a half ago!), it's still peanuts for google, in the grand scheme of things. Google's market cap is a whopping 130 billion dollars (*)right now, and this was an all-stock transaction. Essentially that means that youtube was valued at just 1.25% the worth of Google itself.
(*) http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=GOOG&c=DIS,GM&t=
Of course, the let the avalange of copyright lawsuits ensue, now there's actually someone will billions in cash in the bank behind it...
(*) http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=GOOG&c=DIS,GM&t=
Of course, the let the avalange of copyright lawsuits ensue, now there's actually someone will billions in cash in the bank behind it...