Internet, Billion | featured news

With more than one billion unique visitors every month, YouTube asserted last night that the battle between television and the online video giant is over. YouTube claimed victory with six billion views per month. According to the Wall Street Journal, which cited Mark Mahaney's estimates, a stock analyst at RBC Capital Markets,  that YouTube generated about $4 billion in revenue in 2012, up from $2.5 billion in 2011.

Facebook's stock market debut left founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg with a paper fortune currently valued at $13 billion -- and a 2012 tax bill of around $1.1 billion.vZuckerberg's whopping tax hit stems from his move last May to increase his stake in Facebook. On the day of Facebook's initial public offering, Zuckerberg exercised a stock option and purchased 60 million Facebook shares at a "strike price" of 6 cents each.

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt plans to sell stock valued at $2.5 billion over the next year as part of a trading plan that would cut his stake in the Internet company by more than 40%.

The answer to the trivia question will be: "Monkey Drums (Goskel Vancin Remix) by Chase Buch." That's the 25 billionth song purchased on iTunes....

Yahoo Inc believes it has "numerous" grounds to appeal a Mexico City civil court's $2.7 billion preliminary judgment against the company, including both errors in procedure and in application of law, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters on Monday.

Cyber Monday online sales beat forecasts by nearly half a billion dollars. ComScore on Monday predicted that Cyber Monday would generate $1.5 billion in online sales, but according to Adobe, the shopping day ended up raking in $1.98 billion, which was a 17% increase compared to last year.

Priceline is buying Kayak in a $1.8 billion cash-and-stock deal, adding a travel search site that went public earlier this year.

More than a billion people now log into Facebook each month to check up on old friends, tag photos of new ones and post about politics, religion, cats or what their kids are doing. That's double the 500 million it hit in July 2010 - what now seems like a lifetime but was a little more than two years ago. August 2008 marked another milestone, 100 million. The latest milestone also amounts to nearly half of the world's roughly 2.5 billion Internet users, as measured by the International Telecommunications Union.

Kevin Systrom's smartest move was to sell Instagram to Facebook early, before having to deliver even an iota of revenue. My prediction is that we’ll look back on Facebook's acquisition of Instagram as a bust—much in the same way we now view News Corp.’s purchase of Myspace, AOL’s purchase of Bebo, and Excite@Home’s purchase of Blue Mountain Arts.

Yahoo reported its earnings Tuesday, posting a slight revenue decline to $1.22 billion and setting the stage for a new chapter in the company’s history. The company has been busy in the past quarter, settling a patent spat with Facebook, making a deal with Alibaba, launching a new Axis browser in a mobile push, and completely changing the makeup of its board.