With news of its $1.65 billion takeover by Google on Monday getting rock-star coverage, by now even your grandma knows about YouTube. But don't be surprised if she gives you a call and asks, "What's the big deal about some rollform-equipment company from Perrysburg, Ohio?"

Sorry, grams, like a lot of folks -- millions of them, in fact -- you might have accidentally gone to UTube.com, the site for the Ohio machine company (specializing in used tube mills, pipe mills and rollforming machines) that has suddenly vaulted ahead of Whirlpool to become the sixth most popular manufacturing site on the Web, according to Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corporation owner Ralph Girkins.

"We're not a Whirlpool or a G.M. We couldn't even keep the site up this week," said Girkins, who finally got the homepage of his 18-person company back online as of Friday morning (October 13) after major outages since the YouTube deal was announced. This unintentional traffic spike has been going on for awhile, but the billion-dollar buyout sent things through the roof (see "May We Suggest GooTube? Google Buys YouTube In $1.6 Billion Deal").

In August, the last month he kept count, Girkins said UTube got 68 million hits and by September the numbers were so far off the charts for his specialty site -- whose domain he has owned since the late 1980s, before the commercial World Wide Web even launched, he notes with pride -- that he stopped counting. "Before YouTube came around, the traffic was very low, but since they've been around we've just been trying to maintain it and this week it got impossible," he said.

Girkins said he'd consider selling the domain name and starting fresh, but so far no one from Google or YouTube has officially approached him with an offer, though plenty of calls have come in from third parties offering to take the domain off his hands for $1 million or more. "We'd consider selling it," he said, "But it would be a substantial amount. Definitely more than $1 million."

A spokesperson for YouTube could not be reached for comment at press time.