Susan Mernit submits: I started the day reading about how TechCrunch's Mike Arrington felt attacked by the journalists at the Online News Association conference, and ended it hearing that Google (GOOG) had indeed bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in do no evil stock. That news got me thinking about what Google mighta coulda bought with their money and didn't, and I got to asking myself where the paradigm shift was in that.
For instance, with that kind of dough, Google could have bought the New York Times Company (NYT). I remember talking with Timesman Martin Nisenholtz about how the NYTimes was one of the biggest consumers/placements for Google AdWords, right behind the big portals as they were still called then, Yahoo and AOL (this must have been late 2004.) Nisenholz felt that the Times had to find a way to roll up in size, and not soon after, they bought About.com.
Presumably, if Google was looking for a property that they could own to place their own AdWords on, they could have considered buying The New York Times. But no--they didn't, did they--and the decision to spend all this money on YouTube shows that the coffin nails of mainstream media are already strewn across the open grave (Yes, I am feeling poetic tonight, that kind of day).
The amazing miracle of YouTube versus The Times, as everyone reading this blog surely already knows, is that YouTube is a platform where cream--user-uploaded videos--rises the the top, to be savored by the world, while The New York Times Company is an information organization that pays thousands of journalists, designers, business people and administrative types millions of dollars to create expert content that tells people what to think and what to like. And honey, that day is passing fast.
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