by Sean O'Grady
The title and subtitle of Miguel Helft's August Fortune cover story pulls no punches:
"HOW YOUTUBE CHANGES EVERYTHING" "With a billion uniques (visitors) per month and growth over 50% this year, Google's video juggernaut is minting money and disrupting the media world."
The body of the article is no less compelling and can be found in its entirety by visiting Fortune. It's a longish profile - designed for a magazine, not the web - but the article is a must read for any Producer, Reporter, Program Manager or Content Creator who doesn't plan on retiring in 3-5 years.
Article's Key Points:
- A 22-year-old with limited-to-no journalistic training can gain 44k YouTube views within hours
- DreamWorks Animation paid $33 million to buy AwesomenessTV (a YouTube channel)
- Google makes $3.6 billion in annual revenue from YouTube. 20% growth expected in 2014
- Subscribers are YouTube's new emphasis, NOT VIEWS. YouTube is acting like a TV network
- YouTube shows get 4.4 million views in days - similar to Walking Dead's Nielsen audience
- YouTube is experimenting with subscriptions for some of its premium channels
Helft's (@mhelft) article concludes by noting how "making it to television" is the coveted endgame of most, if not all, of YouTube's creative aspirants, but between the essay's black and white lines lay some tectonic faults. Namely, one day in the not-so-distant future the YouTube tribe may not need nor want to migrate to the boob tube.
Why go nomad if they and their advertising entourages are gaining audiences and dollars equivalent to television?
As mentioned above, Helft's YouTube article was written in August. That's a long time in the web-world. Since then two articles written this month (October) appear to add velocity to television's winds of change.
Disruption:
In an article in the October issue of the Harvard Business Review, Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator's Dilemma about disruptive technologies, argues how the traditional consulting industry is being undermined by newer and cheaper alternatives.
In the article, Christensen outlines the implications of the disruption noted in the consulting industry. Granted, the television /media business isn't consulting, but I can't help but wonder how 1940's newspapermen might opine upon the following excerpt after having heard Edward R. Murrow say "This is London," over the radio during World War II.
From the Harvard Business Review:
"No one can say for sure what will happen. Disruption is, after all, a process, not an event, and it does not necessarily mean all-out destruction. We believe that the theory has four implications for the industry:
1. A consolidation—a thinning of the ranks—will occur in the top tiers of the industry over time, strengthening some firms while toppling others. (What happened to all those smaller newspapers and radio stations during the Great Recession?)
2. Industry leaders and observers will be tempted to track the battle for market share by watching the largest, most coveted clients, but the real story will begin with smaller clients—both those that are already served by existing consultancies and those that are new to the industry. (Are small businesses advertising on TV or finding web solutions?)
3. The traditional boundaries between professional services are blurring, and the new landscape will present novel opportunities. (If a 22-year-old can be paid $15.00 per hour to create a video why hire a Hollywood crew?)
4. The steady invasion of hard analytics and technology (big data) is a certainty in consulting, as it has been in so many other industries. (A YouTube video gets feedback and views instantaneously. No guesswork. You know exactly how many people have viewed your show vs. Nielsen's projections.)"
The Nielsen Company:
Speaking of Nielsen, the granddaddy of TV measurement announced yesterday it will finally add streaming viewers to its influential ratings. This coming on the heels of an earlier announcement from Nielsen that it will begin tracking Twitter ratings during shows.
The full article about Nielsen's adjustments can be found here.
The Trend:
What is this all adding up to? As our colleagues in finance say, "past performance is no guarantee of future success," but the information outlined above and the following unscientific trend is hard to ignore for communications professionals:
Radio disrupted Print
Television disrupted Radio and Print
Web is disrupting Television, Radio and Print
See you online next week!
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