Google is not going to stop paying for its $1.65 billion acquisition of YouTube anytime soon, argues a new report from Credit Suisse analysts Spencer Wang and Kenneth Sena. The "math is pretty simple," too, says WebProNews. YouTube will generate around $240 million in revenue this year, but its expenses could add up to roughly $711 million. The biggest and most unavoidable expense is bandwidth, notes Todd Spangler of Multichannel News. "Bandwidth accounts for about 51% of expenses -- with a run rate of $1 million per day," he says, noting that content licensing accounts for another 36% of …

News Corp. chairman Rupert Murdoch is urging media companies to fight back against Google, despite the fact that the search giant sends more than 300 million clicks a month to newspaper sites. "Should we be allowing Google to steal all our copyrights?" Murdoch asked at an industry conference in Washington, D.C., last week. The answer, he said, should be, "Thanks, but no thanks." For its part, Google says its practices are in "full compliance" with copyright laws. In a statement, the Web giant defended Google News in particular. "We show just enough information to make the user want to read …

Viacom CEO Phillipe Dauman said there's unlikely to be any significant backlash over "TV Everywhere," Time Warner's plan to extend cable TV and satellite subscriptions to Internet-enabled devices at no extra charge to consumers. "People are used to paying for video subscriptions," Dauman said at an industry conference. "They're used to paying for broadband service, so there's nothing new there." Dauman added that it's important that the existing network pay structure be preserved. Cable networks make money in two ways: ad sales, and fees distributors like Time Warner Cable and DirecTV pay to carry their programming. Distributors, for their part, …

Is search finally feeling the recession? According to Covario, an online marketing analytics firm, it is. In fact, spending from quarter to quarter probably fell for the first time in search history in the first quarter, the company said. BusinessWeek's Rob Hof is quick to point out that the report isn't necessarily representative of the wider search industry, as Covario's client base, used for the research, is largely tech and consumer electronics based. According to the report, most of the decline in first quarter spending came from Europe, the Middle East and Africa; altogether, these areas saw a 16% drop …

BlackBerry maker Research in Motion posted very strong fourth quarter results on Thursday, beating analyst's revenue and subscriber growth estimates, while absolutely crushing expectations for net subscriber additions in the first quarter. Perhaps most important, the company expects margins to stay in the 40% range for the fiscal year; Silicon Alley Insider notes that a margin collapse had been a key concern heading into the earnings call. Revenue for the fourth quarter came in at $3.46 billion, ahead of the Street consensus of $3.40 billion. Net subscriber additions were 3.9 million, well-ahead of the company's own estimate, which had been …

Last night, TechCrunch, citing "two separate people close to the negotiations," claimed that Google was in the late stages of acquiring Twitter for an undisclosed price. Later, the tech blog updated its claim with another source who said the acquisition discussions were still in the fairly early stages, and that the two companies were also considering working together on a real-time search engine. You can assume that any Google offer would be considerably higher than the $250 million valuation that Twitter saw in its most recent round of funding. Facebook obviously tried to buy the microblogging sensation for $500 million …

TechCrunch's report that Google is in late stage talks to acquire Twitter may sound exciting, but "it isn't accurate in any way," says Kara Swisher, citing numerous sources. As one says, the companies have merely been engaged in "some product-related discussions" about real-time search and Google doing a better job crawling the microblogging service. Said the Twitter source: "There was a discussion [Google executive Marissa Mayer's] group about real-time search and about product stuff. It was a couple weeks ago. It was very preliminary...and that was that." Said another: "Seriously, no negotiations, no deal, nada." That doesn't mean that Google …

Ad-supported MySpace Music "was supposed to herald a new era" for digital music, but it hasn't worked out that way, says Wired's Eliot Van Buskirk. "Though far from a misbegotten roll-out," he says, "the brief history of MySpace Music is a tale of missed opportunities, silo mentalities and unwarranted reluctance to trust the audience." MySpace Music CEO Courtney Holt, who took charge of the site in January, admits to many of the service's shortcomings. "It was plumbing and a playlist," Holt says. "But it wasn't overly social, it wasn't deep enough, and we didn't really empower the users to do …