GoogleTube

It didn't take long for an internet power to gobble up YouTube and its fast-growing popularity. Google announced today that it will buy YouTube for $1.65 billion, the most expensive purchase in the search engine company's history.

This comes on the heels of YouTube announcing that it has closed deals with CBS, Vivendi's Universal Music Group and BMG Music Entertainment to allow content from those companies to appear on the video site, thus avoiding potential copyright infringement lawsuits.

$1.65 billion is a hefty price to pay for a company that is less than two years old, but according to the AP report and numbers from comScore Media Matrix, YouTube's audience was up to 72.1 million through this past August.

Now Google owns it and its vast empire, which includes e-mail, blogs (hello, Blogger.com!), maps, digitzed books and now online videos, will continue to grow.