I woke up this morning with Google on my mind (a hit tune, if I ever heard one), and I want to talk directly to broadcasters for a bit. If that’s not you, just bear with me.
I wrote yesterday that broadcasting took another blow in the Google/YouTube deal. Let me explain a little more.
In any community, Media 1.0 distribution is with the form of the medium. Newspapers pay people to take the paper to your house (or, increasingly, spam your mailbox). The airwaves for radio or television in your town carry signals via spectrum licensed by the FCC. As long as you have spectrum — and consumers have a way of receiving that spectrum — you have a business. Scarcity is what gives you financial success, and that’s what’s turned upside-down in the Media 2.0 world.
As broadcasters, our decisions about new media have been largely brand extension strategies, and while this is a good thing, it ultimately plays into the hands of the Googles, Yahoos and MSNs of the world. We’re trapped, because we don’t realize that scarcity doesn’t mean what it used to mean.
New media companies understand this, however, and the new scarcity is created by aggregating as many “pieces” of media as possible in one place. Why does this work? Because there are far more people creating content than there is time for people to consume it. Therefore, trusted, smart filters (or smart aggregators, as I call them) become desirable. Who does the filtering? Sometimes, it’s a person or people, but increasingly we consumers do it ourselves — by voting with our time and our eyeballs. Who doesn’t automatically go to the “most viewed” section of YouTube to see what everybody’s watching?
One of the fundamentals of postmodernism is that people trust each other more than hierarchical and self-serving institutions.
Our new media strategy to make our content available everywhere (unbundling) is smart, because we want our content to be where the eyeballs are. In so doing, however, we need to understand that we’re feeding the beast that will ultimately destroy us. This is only acceptable if we move quickly to create our own local smart aggregators.
The longer we insist that our viewers must come to our websites to access our content, the sooner will come our demise. Our brand means scarcity over-the-air, but it’s just another pixel on the page of Media 2.0.
I also think it’s foolish to dismiss the Google/YouTube marriage as “moronic” from a legal perspective. Mark Cuban is obsessed with the copyright issues involved when people upload material that he doesn’t believe is theirs to upload. I respect Mr. Cuban and think he’s providing a valuable service by making his views known, but I also think that many aggregator sites function as common carriers under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and that safe harbor rules apply.
There certainly is enough grey area to warrant a complete overhaul of copyright law (it’s not “property”), which I believe is long overdue and will benefit both consumers and content creators. There’s a lot of money at stake here, and I think people are willing to pay for art. However, I don’t think consumers are wrong in rejecting the demands of the record and film industries who have — through their lust for gold — taken the art out of artistry and replaced it with formulas and hype.
Few people understand the desire of people to participate in “their” media like ZeFrank. He’s launched a campaign that allows viewers of “the show” to buy a placement on that day’s page. It’s hilarious, and by my count, Ze cleared $2,100 on today’s show. 
So YouTube has merged with Google to become YoogleTube (I made that up). It’s the biggest event since Rupert bought MySpace, and he got the better deal. 
One of the things that I continually run up against in my dealings with people in broadcasting is a weird kind of naivete when it comes to acknowledging the degree to which the people formerly known as the audience are hip to what we do, especially our hype. Here’s a great case in point.