5 Biggest Tech Acquisitions That May Never Be Topped

4. Google’s Acquisition of YouTube

Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) has bought roughly 170 companies since its launch as Google in 1998. But its timely acquisition of YouTube in 2006 dwarfs all of its deals due to the long-term and explosive growth opportunities it tapped into with this deal. Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) acquired YouTube 10 years ago for a hefty $1.6 billion when YouTube was just over a year old. YouTube had around 50 million users worldwide at the time of the deal. Today, YouTube has over a billion users and is the unrivaled video content king. Google beat companies like Microsoft, Viacom, Yahoo, and the News Corporation in its bid to acquire YouTube, and that has proven to be a major coup, with estimates now putting YouTube’s value in the $100 billion range. There are approximately 400 hours of new video content uploaded to YouTube per minute as of the end of 2015, and for its fiscal first quarter of 2017, Google posted $22.45 billion in revenue, a good chunk of which came from YouTube video ads.

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On the next page we’ll discuss three more tech acquisitions that changed the course of the global technology sector.