YouTube Acquires India, NZ Domains For Around Rs. 2.44 Lakhs
Reader Ravi Venkatraman directs us in the comments to this post, to a notification (Pdf) from India’s official domain registry, which states that YouTube acquired the domain names www.youtube.co.nz, www.youtube.co.in and www.youtube.in for a sum of NZ$8000 (around Rs 2,44,000 or 6100 USD) from Rohit Kohli from New Zealand.
lucky guy, congratz to him
For Google it must be like giving a tip to the hair dresser. I would have sold this domain for atleast 6 times of that cost to some one else. Anyways nice to know :)
I dont think so, If you ask for more, they will surely file a wipo,
in my opinion they could have continued on with the .com domain. The way i see it is that if there is going to be a lot of UGC content coming from India , it would be up on .com anyway… whats the point of a co.in domain from that angle then. I had argued this point when the initial rumors of youtube starting an India site began as well.
given the fact that YOUTUBE is already in Top 10 most trafficked site in India price seems to be justified . 2.44 Lakhs is loose coins for Google .
Greater implication of this news is for startups like Nautanki.TV or Sumo.TV .
what if Google decide to host India centric Electoral debate , start providing a platform for Brands to get User generated Advertisements ,Signature show for Celebrity Blogger , or Shekhar Suman . Video hosting for Newspaper . No one can ensure uptime like google and no one has financial muscle to subsidize Bandwidth . and good thing is that they can Advertise along these videos too . if you look at all this 2.44 lakhs won't look significant at all . its dirt .
BTW i wonder if anyone here knows about What % of Content on youtube is uploaded from India ??
I did not know Indian domains could fetch this much.
prashant: more importantly…how much original content are Indian uploading. most of what we've seen is copyrighted.
p.s.: speaking of user generated content from India, i've linked to a friend's short film at my blog, so check that out. Then there were the Pentagram-Voice videos..and Soo's friend had shot a video while on his bike. That's all the user generated Indian content I remember…