YouTube, what am I bid?

Nobody really thinks YouTube is for sale, but some greedy guys gotta drool over a potential sales price. One Big Apple tab tells us it has a "senior industry source" putting the YouTube price at $1.5 billion.

Talk about inflation, bubble, irrational exuberance, whatever. Just last month, we had a story indicating YouTube could be worth over a billion. A year ago, News Corp. paid $580 million for the parent company of MySpace.com. Then last month Google paid $900 million just for a three-year deal to serve ads on MySpace. And YouTube has a much larger user base than MySpace and could presumably serve video ads.

The list of potential YouTube buyers is lengthy. Larger Web 2.0 sites are now hot properties. Note the buzz around a possible Yahoo and Facebook deal. Another deal, another billion dollars.

I know, the tab does quote YouTube as saying it's focused on building a viable company, not an auction. But let's get real. Over half of all the video served online. YouTube. Hey, what am I bid?