i do think its an awesome site to discover new j-rock bands, as there are a ton of PVs uploaded on there...  i just got hooked on antic cafe...

Mugen videos are cool too...check out Homer Simpson and Omega Tiger Woods in action.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kW41Y7tjUPQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5GlS9CRuUU

And just for kicks (classic NES adaptations):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUpRTGtAmno
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O8g-Kha1hZs

Lot's of good Japanese content on there overall too, like you said.

But yeah...Definitely not worth more than $1,000,000,000. Google must've had some serious $$$ to blow...

Speaking of which it makes you wonder just how much wealth Google has.

Last I heard, its market capitalization was around $130+ billion.

Not anymore, news reports say JASRAC just told youtube to pull 29,549 clips which were infringing on JP copyrights.

Full story below:
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/J/ … 0-10-37-37

Well this is the thing with YouTube - as far as I can tell, a massive amount of its content is copyrighted material. There is an attitude on the web when it comes to things like this that people just put the stuff up and, if someone has a problem with it, they'll be told to take it down. This is mostly just because the internet is difficult to police. It's no more legal than breaking into someones house until the house owners call to you personally to ask you to stop.

While this is something that I actually love about the internet, when certain sites get too big it is only going to lead to a huge clampdown on the content they feature and so defeating the purpose of the site.

well i can understand forcing youtube to pull down uploads of full shows that would otherwise be for sale on dvd. but promotional videos by definition are videos that help with the sales of the music cds, so the more exposure the better. its not like you can save the clips on youtube anyways..

Actually, you CAN save them.  Go to keepvid.org to see what I mean.  That said, I don't think the quality of the videos on YouTube should cause enough threat to hurt sales of DVDs that have PVs on them (you can blame torrents for hurting that market).

I find YouTube more interesting for the more fleeting and uncopyrighted content. Like foreign commercials and this great Final Fantasy live-action spoof:

http://youtube.com/watch?v=GjOp-2oS2DE