The deep-pocketed Google brain trust has bought YouTube for 1.6 gazillion dollars and the various media outlets are all excited. If one were to only read the financial and computer rags, this event marks the Second Coming of the Messiah, the discovery of life on Mars and the Bush Twins doing a spread for Hustler all rolled up into one big puppy pile of glee. What the purchase truly is, is P.T. Barnum brought to life, again.
Google we all know. It is a search engine. More correctly, a search engine that sells search engine ranking positions for money. Google rankings have a much to do with the size of the wallet as the popularity of the ranked site. Not to knock Google completely, as for a few years they had the pre-eminent method for finding things on the Word Wide Wait. Google even became a verb as things evolved. Google has, at least according to some, indexed everything on the web and now is trying to figure out how to copyright it all as Google property so they can sell it back to you.
This explains why this blog has a copyright tag on it, as it is almost entirely original writing and by definition, my property. It is not the property of Google, MSN Search/LiveSearch, Technorati or anyone else except me, unless I very specifically give up the rights to it. Which I would do for money. Lots of money.
YouTube is a place to post videos that you can share with others: Essentially, YouTube is "Earth’s Dumbest Home Videos". I despair of our planet if alien life is tapping into YouTube as an example of how humans live. YouTube has rules regarding posting material that is not yours to post, for instance posting clips of the original StarTrek without permission of Paramount. As best I can determine a lot of the rules regarding copyright are only enforced if someone with a lot of lawyers complains.
Despite the copyright shenanigans, YouTube gets millions of visitors a week. Those visitors are what marketing wanks call ‘eyeballs’. The more eyeballs, the more likely some of the eyeballs will click on links or banner ads on each page. The more clicks, the more money the website gets.
This is not new. Before electronic media, competing newspapers engaged in circulation wars, trying to sell more papers. More papers sold meant more eyeballs and therefore more people potentially reading the advertisement for McMurchee’s Patent Undergarments or Dr. Saslove’s Medicinal Ointment. The more eyeballs, the more you could charge for the advertisement. The same measurement methods moved into radio, then television. A mutant version moved across to the Web.
What Google purchased is the potential to reach millions of eyeballs a week. It is nothing more than Viacom buying CBS a few years ago. There is no paradigm shift, societal redirection or change in the angle of declination from the plane of the ecliptic.
Yes, the two YouTube founders are getting a whack of Google stock and if they sell it tomorrow, will make a mammoth amount of cash. Google gets potential eyeballs that they can sell to advertisers and make more money from the advertisers.
As long as the YouTube brand and place keeps attracting viewers, Google will do fine. As soon as the YouTube brand reaches the end of its’ life, YouTube will be another ghost town on the Web and we can all go back to sleep. This is the essence of media: Attract enough attention and you get enough eyeballs.
Phineas Taylor Barnun, circus promoter, knew this in his bones. Barnum was possibly the best practitioner of advertising, ever. Barnum knew that people wanted distractions and to see something unique, different, or even a bit frightening. If the event was a bit naughty, so much the better. More people would come to see it and in order to see it, they had to buy a seat. As soon as they bought a seat, you had their money and the game was over.
Incidentally, P.T. Barnun never said "There’s a sucker born every minute." It was actually said by a Syracuse, New York banker named David Hannum who was part of a hoax in 1869, called the Cardiff Giant. Hannum was the one who uttered the timeless phrase.
Even so, regarding Google and YouTube? There’s a sucker born every minute.
RoadDave 