Another PayPal alumni venture: YouTube

Earlier this week the WSJ ran a nice article on a couple of PayPal alumni -- Chad Hurley and Steve Chen -- who started the online video sharing company YouTube.

This venture is one to watch. I hate to compare it to MySpace (since everything in the new media gets compared to MySpace these days), but it seems merited. YouTube is wildly popular, viral, and another decentralized media platform that fits into Chris Anderson's "long tail" model. This kind of a platform is both a source of further media fragmentation, but at the same time it gives traditional content providers such as NBC an excellent platform for promoting their mass market offerings, as well.

Congrats, guys! Just be careful with those lawyers and regulators. (Radley Balko recounts how they tormented PayPal in his review of my book, The PayPal Wars.)