[sophacles]

Not the same thing. The product is not the videos, it's the ads. A more appropriate analogy would be Google selling other video sites access to the ad serving technology, then when that site becomes popular, creating special youtube sub-site that serves identical videos, and telling ad purchasers they can buy ads on the new youtube sub-site for $X or on the other site for $y where $x < $y.

The analogy breaks down here, because IP, licensing and so on interfere with direct analogy.