Confused of Hull

I'm confused. This is why. Say we lived in an age where restaurants are new and fangled. People have just discovered the option of eating out and they like it. So I decide to open a new restaurant. Only mine is special. It gives the food away.

Not surprisingly, once word gets out my little restaurant is going great guns. Queues around the block. At this point things get a bit weird. One of the other restaurants in the neighborhood (it doesn't serve food quite like mine, and it is making quite a good profit at the moment) decides to buy me out for a huge sum of money, and then let me keep going giving my food away.

I get given a huuge wad of cash for starting a food business with no obvious means of support. The other restaurant gets something which may never be profitable, but at least somebody else hasn't got their hands on it.

In case you hadn't spotted it, I'm really talking about YouTube and Google. I use both of them. Google quite a bit. YouTube now and then.

I just can't think of a way in which I could ever be persuaded to pay for what YouTube has to offer. Even if they only charged me mini-bucks to watch the videos I'd find something else which was free to do in my lunch hour. In my opinion the only business plan which could possibly have worked for the YouTube folks was to get famous and hope that somebody rich bought them up before their money ran out. Which, fortunately for them, was just what happened.

Google have just spent literally billions getting their hands on YouTube, and I'm baffled as to why they have done this.

(for some reason the Microsoft LiveWriter spell checker suggests Outnumber as a replacement for YouTube - this just confuses me even more)