Having huffed and puffed and still not blown the housing market down, NBC News is now raising fears of another bubble. A tech bubble.
With Internet company Google’s (NASD: GOOG) recent purchase of YouTube for $1.6 billion, NBC’s “Today” show sought to warn of a repeat of the Clinton era dot-com bubble history repeating.
“Bubblicious. Could Google’s billion-dollar purchase of YouTube signal another dot-com boom,” asked anchor Matt Lauer as he narrated the opening credits to the October 11 program.
Reporter Carl Quintanilla also suggested that an Internet boom must really be a bubble waiting to burst.
Over an onscreen graphic that read “Internet Insanity: Is the Dot.Com Boom Back,” Quintanilla suggested the Google purchase of YouTube may presage another “dot-com bubble” like the one that bedeviled the stock market, and the economy, in 2000.
YouTube’s purchase “is being compared to some of the big buyouts of the Internet boom of the late ’90s and we all know how that turned out,” Quintanilla added ruefully before showing an analyst warning that “we may be heading down the path towards yet another Internet bubble.”
Some caution may not be unreasonable, but not everyone has as bleak a view of what the Google acquisition portends for the dot-com industry.
“I think some media conglomerates will make small acquisitions and you might see some that make some surprising moves based on the YouTube deal,” David Carson, co-CEO of video Web site Heavy.com told CNNMoney.com’s Paul R. La Monica.
In other words not all future buyouts will be as nearly eye-popping as Google’s purchase of YouTube, although some companies can afford larger price tags.
Indeed, Tom Gardner of investment firm Motley Fool also told Quintanilla that sites similar to, but less popular than, YouTube may be snatched up by Google competitors but that “they’re not going to be anywhere near what YouTube is, nor should they.”
Quintanilla closed his report by conceding that “it will be years before we know who’s right” about Google’s billion-dollar gamble, but his story was clearly meant to float new fears of a sequel to the Clinton tech bubble.
