Google’s planned acquisition of YouTube could be a step forward for youth online safety on the hugely popular video-sharing site. It’ll probably take longer for YouTube to hire a full-time “online-safety czar,” as News Corp. did not long after it acquired MySpace, because copyrights and intellectual property are the No. 1 controversy of this high-profile deal. “The purchase was announced after the two companies reached several licensing deals with media companies, which could help ease concerns about copyright violations on YouTube,” the Wall Street Journal reports. But being acquired by a public company usually lends a measure of corporate responsibility, and children’s online safety will probably be part of the equation at YouTube too. YouTube does not screen the thousands of videos people upload to it daily, and Google Video says it does (see Google’s page on video content). The Wall Street Journal reports that YouTube’s purchase price is $1.65 billion, and Google CEO Eric Schmidt indicates in the article that the social-networking aspect of YouTube (users create their own profiles) was part of its attraction for the search giant. The other part, of course, was growth and traffic. YouTube’s traffic grew “nearly 2,500% from August 2005 to August 2006, from 2.8 million visitors to 72 million,” according to comScore Media Metrix. Google and YouTube together “had a combined worldwide reach of 477 million visitors” aged 15 and up in August, the latest figures available.
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