• The New York Times, Thursday, August 7, 2008 11:30 AM

YouTube is selling out, says The New York Times' Saul Hansell. Upon seeing its video player embedded in one of his favorite blogs, Hansell says the experience looked "closer to the gaudiness of MySpace than the sterility of Google." And YouTube, of course, is owned by Google. So what gives?

The YouTube video player had one text ad in the upper left hand corner and another superimposed over the bottom of the screen. This one changed several times at the beginning of the clip before fading out, which Hansell says distorted the viewing experience.

Google may let bloggers and other publishers who use its products stuff their pages full of all kinds of crap, but perhaps it shouldn't: Hansell likens the layout of the embedded YouTube player to a "NASCAR experience." That said, Google is desperately searching for a way for YouTube to start showing it's worth the $1.65 billion the search giant paid for it in 2006. Hansell believes the video-sharing giant still has the potential to be "one of the best technology acquisitions of all time," especially as all video becomes digital, as he thinks it will in the near future.

Read the whole story at The New York Times »