"Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion in Google stock. Then a site for goofy videos, it has since become by far the dominant streaming platform in America. It is larger than second-place Netflix based on market share. And, it has begun to compete directly, and successfully, with other paid subscription services. It has gone from a novelty to a major division of Alphabet, which was the umbrella company created in 2015 to hold all of Google's divisions."
"whether it could keep pace with the next generation of technologies. In cloud computing, it ranked third (on a good day) behind Microsoft's Azure and Amazon's AWS. It was not a force in artificial intelligence (AI), which many believe is the most important invention in two decades, maybe longer. OpenAI's ChatGPT outflanked it and the rest of the industry. So had Anthropic, Elon Musk's xAI's Grok, and Microsoft's Copilot. Alphabet suddenly jumped to the head of the AI pack with the release of Gemini 3."
Alphabet (Google) rose to dominant search market share worldwide outside Russia and China, generating massive profits despite antitrust scrutiny. Google acquired YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion, and YouTube became the leading U.S. streaming platform and a major revenue source, producing $10.3 billion in the most recent quarter versus Alphabet's $102.4 billion total. Alphabet leads in search, video streaming, email (Gmail), maps, and the Chrome browser. Concerns emerged about competitiveness in next-generation technologies: cloud trails Azure and AWS, and earlier AI efforts lagged competitors. Gemini 3 surged to outperform GPT-5 on many measures, pressuring OpenAI.
Read at 24/7 Wall St.
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