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Eric Schmidt and the YouTube Election

November 17, 2008
by Owen Thomas
Managing Editor, Valleywag

Owen Thomas

Is YouTube making Google a political player? The video-sharing site, with its stratospheric bandwidth bills and questionable new ad formats, may never pay Larry and Sergey back in cash for the $1.65 billion they shelled out to buy it in 2006. But it doesn’t have to. YouTube, having conquered online video, is taking over political broadcasting. The conventional unwisdom in Manhattan and Washington, D.C., is that this election made YouTube. Pah! It’s true that campaign videos spread faster than ever thanks to YouTube. But they made up a tiny fraction of clips and traffic on the site. Politicians owe YouTube a debt that Google is just starting to collect on–and hosting President Obama’s 21st century fireside chats is just a down payment.

Google (GOOG) has plenty of business in Washington these days, from the Federal Communications Commission to the Department of Justice. Convenient, then, that CEO Eric Schmidt endorsed Obama weeks before the election, joining his board of economic advisers and appearing in Obama’s primetime infomercial. Schmidt doesn’t need a government job–he’s clearly volunteering to be America’s CTO in his spare time.

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