Google has acquired YouTube for $1.65B

While I understand audience as a value, what is really this for? From what I have seen, and despite interesting experiments on what can be done in terms of entertainment and next generation reality TV, why would Google care about YouTube. From the reports I read, YouTube was loosing money and had no real revenue model that is worth anything. Google might as well let them disappear and pick up the left-overs. Except they would have lost traffic that they had not been able to generate themselves directly with Google Video. So this is more of a "save what can be saved" move than a visionary plan looking at a better brighter future.

If you were wondering whether there is a bubble looming behind the web 2.0 hype, now you know...