But even that’s not the real value of YouTube. As video search becomes more sophisticated, this huge library of material becomes increasingly valuable as a source of results in search engines and their associated advertising - and that’s Google’s real revenue stream. Google is not a publishing company, it’s a search and advertising company, and the more content it can index, the more relevant results it can deliver, the more money it makes. In five years time, when you’re searching on the next big thing, there’s a strong chance there’ll be something on YouTube that will match your results, and, oddly enough, possibly be worth watching.

Sure, most User Generated Content is worthless. But for every million or so pieces of crap, there are a couple of gems. The marginal costs of storage and hosting - something foreign to companies in Australia where both are outrageously expensive, and under-recognised in the US because corporate IT departments have no political motive to adopt Google’s fast/cheap/throwaway infrastructure model - mean that Google is paying a pittance to acquire these gems. In time, it will work. In the meantime, Google can afford to experiment.