May 9th, 2011

YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have bought Tap 11, a social media analytics firm.

The purchase comes less than three weeks after the duo bought the social bookmarking service Delicious from Yahoo.

Tap11 builds Web-based, real-time analytics software that more than 500 businesses use to track what is being tweeted, written and said about them on social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

“Our vision is to create the world’s best platform for users to save, share and discover new content,” Hurley said in a statement. “With the acquisition of Tap11, we will be able to provide consumer and enterprise users with powerful tools to publish and analyze their links’ impact in real time.”

“With over 1 billion users on the social Web and no good tools to systematically archive and analyze this data, there is a massive loss of marketing intelligence,” Zbar said.

Hurley and Chen founded YouTube with Jawed Karim in 2005, the three men each former employees of PayPal. Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.76 billion and today it is the world’s most popular video sharing and viewing website.