Google is buying video-sharing website YouTube for $1.65bn (£883m) in shares after a weekend of speculation that a deal was in the offing.

The two companies will continue to operate independently, Google said as it announced the news on Monday.

YouTube, launched in February 2005, has grown quickly into one of the most popular websites on the internet.

It has 100 million videos viewed every day and an estimated 72 million individual visitors each month.

'Natural partners'

"The YouTube team has built an exciting and powerful media platform that complements Google's mission to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful," Google chief executive Eric Schmidt said in a statement.