Autopsy of how the youTube news Spread

If you have heard by now from TechCrunch and BBC, Google has now acquired YouTube for $1.65bn (£883m) in shares and officially announced the deal yesterday (Monday). Of course, our resident, Wannapreneur, will give us an autopsy on how the initial rumours started and was propagated by the news of this big acquisition.

By now, it’s pretty old news to anyone who reads the news or keeps a lookout about all things tech-related to be aware of Google’s US$1.6 Billion offer for youTube.

But that’s not what I’m interested in looking at today, but how the ability to provide credible and timely information has shifted dramatically from traditional media to what I would call (for lack of a better term) the new media, which generally encompasses a wide range of online technologies and platforms such as blogs, forums, news aggregators and RSS feeds.

This I think is the rough chronological order (timings are guesstimate at best) by which the word about this possible buyout was spread:

1. On the night of 6th Oct, Michael Arrington posted on TechCrunch (one of the most read blogs regarding Silicon Valley startups) about an unsubstantiated rumor that Google was offering $1.6 Bn for youTube. At this point, 113 thousand subscribers of the TechCrunch RSS Feed could have instantly had a copy of this news zapped to them when they opened their RSS readers.
2. Quickly after the first post on Techcrunch, bloggers worldwide (including yours truely) scrambled to add their commentaries on the situation. New trackbacks appeared almost every 10-20 minutes. I would guess that since the news contains only 2 big names and a big dollar figure, it wasn’t distorted too much. But interestingly, according to the trackbacks, it got translated into many other languages like German, Korean and Italian.
3. Possibly still on the same night of the 6th or early on 7th Oct, word spread quickly through the blogosphere, further aided by the fact that it was got posted up on Digg, quickly attracting the attention of Digg users who then pushed it up in rank, commented on it and essentially spread the word. Easily a few more thousand online users (including Digg’s RSS Feed Readers) got wind of the news.
4. Another round of blogging on the subject by online denizens worlds. Blogosphere literally explodes with the news. According to Technorati, it seems like around 1000 more blogs posted with the keyword youTube.
5. Finally, some time later, it was noted that Wall Street Journal reported on this news citing information from “a person familiar with the matter”. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get a good fix on when this happened. I couldn’t get my hands on the article itself as it was a subscribers-only area – so unless you could get your hands on a copy of the paper or subscribed to the online version, you wouldn’t have heard zip from it.
6. Hitwise jumps in the fun to provide some stats between youTube VS Google Video.
7. Very much later, if you are from Singapore like me, you catch some word of it quoted in the Strait Times 3 days after Time-0, in a easily missed column snuggled inside the Financial Pages.

If you ask me, what just happened displayed a great shift in the way media production and consumption works today. Newspapers and other print media are now considered slow in comparison to what online alternatives can offer. the 4 channels of blogs, forums, news aggregators and RSS Feeds work in synergy and semi-automation explode news which are deemed (1) of general interest and (2) of some standard of credibility.

What happened here is a study of influence. To be able to generate and spread news that in a tsunami fashion in a matter of mere hours is something unfathomable before and frankly, a very serious threat that traditional media should be (and I think they are) aware of. Production of conventional media alone may take hours already, not to mention the collation, editing, verification and (after production), distribution of the media.

On the flipside, it is important to know that credibilty of traditional media is still something of a forte for them though the online generation is fast learning to accept lower levels of validation in exchange of a much more rapid speed of news transmission. Also, unlike print media, online information can be correctly much more rapidly also, making for more tolerance for errors, given that they are rectified promptly.

I don’t profess to be an authority on how the new media may develop but from what I just saw from the youTube case, these are going to be interesting times indeed.

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