Highly unrealistic valuations. And Youtube, its potential, growth and other things you mention might be right but it is not any close to being profitable at the moment, as it seems.
Google's need wasn't for quick profit, it has good earnings growth. They are looking to the future when they will have to grow profits outside of their traditional niche. We will all be using our PCs to get and serve TV in the future, Google is positioned well for that and is a great advertising company that will figure out how to slip ads into everything.
I did not say anything that could be an anti-thesis against those. Someone said "Youtube is profitable" and i said no, not at the moment. And what you said is completely true. I cant care less about what google is planning or where they are paying their money off, just wanted to correct a fact that is applicable for today. And giving a valuation for something without any deep analysing or supporting facts, is just funny, either name it $40 billion, or $1. We must be stupid enough to take classes for business valuation and formation for years, while we could give a shot in 2-3 sentences. I like to discuss things in detail so i am negatively biased against this kind of threads, sorry.
In my personal experience, website valuations are rarely done correctly. There does not exist the proper metrics to describe the intangible assets that make a website what it is, that is to say, we don't have a way to put a dollar tag on the knowledge of employees or the possible combinations of information retrieved from a database. Regular business valuations have a considerable amount to do with assets and holdings (i.e. product stock, store fronts, etc.) While certain variables do reflect intangible assets, they are generally low level modifiers, not high level items. This obviously changes depending upon WHO is doing the valuation. In most cases though, even profitable web business' who do not hold stock will not receive offers appropriate to the size of their growth, brand, etc.