I MAGINE BEING PHILIPPE P. Dauman, who has been the chief executive of Viacom Inc. for a mere six weeks. His boss, Chairman Sumner M. Redstone, booted his predecessor, Tom Freston, in large part because Freston was too slow to do a big Internet deal. The expectation is that Dauman, who ran his own investment firm, will be quicker to act. In turn, the assumption is that shareholders will applaud and the stock will soar. But the view from Dauman's 52nd floor Times Square office is foggy at best. Only last summer, people were saying News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch had overpaid for the social-networking site MySpace.com. Now the 580 million dollars price tag looks cheap. At least it does compared with the 1.65 billion dollars Google Inc. is paying for You Tube Inc., a 20-month-old video-sharing site with zero profits. Viacom's team held talks with YouTube founders, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, too, but the negotiations never went anywhere. Everyone from Time Warner and Viacom to Yahoo! and Microsoft is under enormous pressure to acquire the next MySpace or YouTube. But amid steadily rising valuations, Old and New Media executives alike are afraid of overpaying and being punished by their shareholders. "We are seeing a valuation gap that sometimes doesn't make sense," says. Wade Davis, Viacom's senior vice-president for mergers and acquisitions, who has overseen a handful of Web 2.0 deals whose prices collectively are well below what Google is paying for YouTube. Time Warner Chairman and CEO Richard D. Parsons, still dealing with the aftermath of the disastrous merger with AOL in 2001, has similar concerns. "We're interested in businesses that endure," he says. "You are not going to grow a business over the long term if it's being valued at 60 times earnings."
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机译：我想成为菲利普·道曼（PHILIPPE P. Dauman），他已经成为维亚康姆（Viacom Inc.）的首席执行官仅六个星期。他的老板萨姆纳·雷德斯通（Sumner M. Redstone）董事长创立了他的前任汤姆·弗雷斯顿（Tom Freston），这在很大程度上是因为弗雷斯顿太慢了，无法完成互联网大交易。期望经营自己的投资公司的道曼能够更快地采取行动。反过来，假设是股东会鼓掌，股票也会飙升。但道曼（Dauman）位于时代广场52楼办公室的景色充其量是雾蒙蒙的。只是在去年夏天，人们才说新闻集团董事长鲁珀特·默多克（Rupert Murdoch）为社交网站MySpace.com支付了高价。现在，5.8亿美元的价格标签看起来很便宜。至少与Google斥资16.5亿美元收购You Tube Inc.相比，You Tube Inc.是一家拥有20个月历史的视频共享网站，利润为零。维亚康姆团队也与YouTube创始人查德·赫尔利（Chad Hurley）和史蒂夫·陈（Steve Chen）进行了会谈，但谈判从未成功。从时代华纳和维亚康姆到Yahoo!的所有人微软承受着巨大的压力来收购下一个MySpace或YouTube。但是，在估值稳步上升的同时，新旧媒体的高管们都担心自己的股东会付出过多的代价并受到惩罚。他说：“我们看到的估值差距有时是没有道理的。”维亚康姆（Viacom）的高级并购副总裁韦德·戴维斯（Wade Davis）曾负责过少数Web 2.0交易，这些交易的总价远低于Google为YouTube支付的价格。时代华纳董事长兼首席执行官理查德·帕森斯仍在处理2001年与美国在线合并的灾难性后果。他说：“我们对持久的业务感兴趣。” “如果它的市值是收益的60倍，那么从长远来看，您将不会发展业务。”
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