It seems that the "real money" that Google paid to YouTube for its instrinsic worth was $ 500 million less than the $ 1.65 billion tag. The shareholders are thus *not* getting $ 1.65 billion but a smaller amount. The YouTube price tag had also spurred wild rumours on the net for the valuation of Facebook by Yahoo!.
In the $ 1.65 billion valuation that everyone thought YouTube got; Google actually paid $ 500 million for dealing with lawsuits from Media companies. After stating that the buyer of YouTube would be a moron -- before Google paid $ 1.65 for YouTube; Mark Cuban has come up with these surprising details of the deal on his blog post "Some Intimate Details on the Google YouTube deal". Mark is quoting a dependable source after he got a lead from a media centered Pho List:
> It didn't take a team of Harvard trained investment bankers to come up with the obvious solution and that is to set aside a portion of the buyout offer to deal with copyright issues. It's not uncommon in transactions to have holdbacks to deal with liabilities and Youtube knew they had a big one. So the parties (including venture capital firm Sequoia Capital) agreed to earmark a portion of the purchase price to pay for settlements and/or hire attorneys to fight claims. Nearly 500 million of the 1.65 billion purchase price is not being disbursed to shareholders but instead held in escrow.
