How YouTube turned a $1B piracy lawsuit into a $60B-a-year business with Content ID
aakashgupta · x · 2026-09-26
A retelling of YouTube's early history: when Google bought the site for $1.65B in 2006, its top videos came from fan accounts, and Viacom sued for $1B within five months, counting 160,000 unauthorized clips viewed 1.5B times — and they were mostly right.
Google's judo move was not purging pirated content but spending over $100M on Content ID, which fingerprints every upload and lets rights holders either take the video down or keep it up and collect ad money.
Almost everyone took the money. Millions of infringing uploads became licensed inventory overnight, growing into a $60B-a-year business.
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