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Why does YouTube work? [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCVxQ_3Ejkg] This very un-corporate video from Chad and Steve, who are geeked out in their finest (perhaps this will be the last of these unguarded moments; or perhaps there were a team of highly-paid, besuited Google lawyers just out of shot) sums up their philosophy - the value of authenticity. YouTube doesn't pretend to offer quality content. But the target audience are those who have a few minutes to spare, who generally know what they like and are hard-wired to spot a phony. Authenticity is the wriggling worm for Gen Y. Is this a replacement for the over-engineered product that Hollywood produces? Certainly not. Neither will this challenge the teams of top writers who currently work for the networks such as HBO. So what is Google really doing by purchasing this? Metadata is the key. In the case of MySpace, Murdoch purchased an interest-incubation lab in entirety. When Abe from Arkansas tells all his friends on the site that the band he saw last night live really rocks, and each of those friends then tells 20 others, before long, the Arkantic Monkeys is born. The problem with conventional A&R is that Abe is a needle in a haystack and it's not worth expending dollars to find him. However, it is clear that he is valuable. By owning (or pwning) the ecosystem, his influence can be reverse engineered after the fact, which is gold dust for the content owners and talent promoters. Google pwnage Google video failed. Google also had the chance to buy MySpace for a third of the price News Corp did, but passed on it, dismissing the technology as replicable. But it wasn't about the tech. And it's not about the 'social network' exactly, either. No-one owns the social network, especially with loyalty on the net a rare commodity, so the actual network can only be monetised through old world advertising models. What's exciting is that the traces of metadata that are left behind through the browsing, rating and sharing through a social networking site can be data-mined, and it's this which I believe is the (unpolished) diamond in the rough. It remains to be seen if Google can cut and polish this raw gem.
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