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Media titans versus YouTube ultimate irony PDF Print E-mail
Written by Stan Beer   
Monday, 11 December 2006
The news that four of the world's most powerful media players are contemplating banding together to create a video website to compete with YouTube, a website developed with relative small change just 18 months ago, is the ultimate irony.

The fact that three former PayPal employees could build one of the world's most successful websites from a tiny office and grow it with an initial investment of just $3.5 million shows how the internet has smashed the barriers of entry to the media. It also shows that money can no longer buy everything.

Yes, Google paid $1.65 billion for YouTube but the site was created for a tiny fraction of that and still managed to attract tens of millions of visitors each month. What's more YouTube still has less than 100 employees.

YouTube's success has obviously made the traditional media players, such as Fox, Viacom, CBS and NBC Universal green with envy. According to a Wall Street Journal report, those four media juggernauts want to create a site to rival YouTube. It takes the combined efforts of four multi-billion dollar media companies to figure out how to build something to rival the effort of a small Silicon Valley startup?

What the WSJ story illustrates is that the days when old media conglomerates commanded the mindshare of the public because of their deep pockets are coming to an end. The Internet has been the great leveller and enabled innovators with limited resources to bring their great ideas into reality.

Rather than try to develop a rival YouTube, old media players would do well to follow the example of fellow old media stalwart News Corp, which spent some of the fortune it has amassed over the years to buy new media success story MySpace.

The fact is that the new media is a different ball game which most old media players aren't equipped to play. The best they can do is to try to buy their way in. {moscomment}


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