Loading Advertising Age 04 24 2007 01 55 PM YouTube Grows Up But What Does It Mean Bob Garfield Explores the Implications of the Video Sharing Revolution By Bob Garfield Published November 20 2006 Editor s note This article is simultaneously being published in the December issue of Wired magazine Look before you even get to the second paragraph try this Click and watch the YouTube com boom goes the dynamite video below It s just a little outtake from a Ball State University campus TV newscast It features a courageous but overmatched freshman named Brian Collins presenting the worst sports highlight rundown in human history culminating in the worst sportscaster catchphrase ever conceived Boom goes the dynamite It is horrifying It is cruel It is hilarious Boom Goes the Dynamite Evolution of Dance http adage com print article id 113249 Or play evolution of dance which has gotten nearly 35 million views in six months You wouldn t think Ohio motivational speaker s grand finale would equal mesmerizing but Judson Laipply s seamless sampling of footwork to 30 songs from Elvis to NSync pretty much is Or try the accurately titled Noah takes a photo of himself everyday for six years A time lapse documentary of Noah Kalina over 2 356 days it s a little thin on plot but it nonetheless racked up more than 3 million views in six weeks You d better also see Numa Numa which stars a chubby young man in his New Jersey bedroom lip syncing to an insipid but weirdly fetching Romanian pop song Or what the hell live dangerously Try sweet tired cat and watch a drowsy kitten dozing off The clip which was viewed nearly 2 million times in two weeks is 27 seconds of such concentrated cuteness that you might actually Page 1 of 9 Loading Advertising Age 04 24 2007 01 55 PM have a stroke and die It s that excruciatingly adorable And as it turns out extremely valuable Google as you may have read in every publication online and off in the entire freaking world just paid 1 65 billion in stock to be the cute little kitty cat s home Noah Takes a Photo of Himself Everyday for Six Years The price tag for YouTube just to put the investment in perspective is what Target paid for 257 Mervyns department stores and four distribution centers in 13 states and just a bit more than WPP Group paid for the Grey Global Group advertising network with 10 500 employees in 83 countries generating 1 3 billion in revenue Those of course are both profitable enterprises with vast fixed assets YouTube s fixed assets pretty much consist of a video interface and a cool retro logo So why is it worth nearly six times the gross domestic product of Micronesia This story will definitively answer that question Well maybe not exactly answer Numa Numa But explore OK guess The desire to create and share But that guesswork begins in a very special very poignant and potentially very lucrative place the hitherto futile aspirations of the everyman to break out of his lonely anonymous life of quiet desperation to step in front of the whole world and be somebody dude A recent Accenture study of 1 600 Sweet Tired Cat Americans found that 38 of respondents wanted to create or share content online Aha Suddenly the inexplicable Numa Numa begins to make sense He could so he did And so have lots like him It s said that if you put a million monkeys at a million typewriters eventually you will get the works of William Shakespeare When you put together a million humans a million camcorders and a million computers what you get is YouTube And there they are in the bedrooms and dorms and cubicles of the world uploading their asses off more than 65 000 times a day on YouTube alone If you aren t posting you don t exist says Rishad Tobaccowala CEO of Denuo a new media consultancy People say I post therefore I am Constituo ergo sum An interesting formulation that may well represent a new rationalism for the digital age But for the moment let s not put Descartes before the horse Let s just get the measure of a phenomenon in progress because Google has recently bet the equivalent of 257 Mervyns stores that the rise of video sharing is more than just the latest rage To YouTube s new owners Numa Numa represents nothing less than cultural http adage com print article id 113249 Page 2 of 9 Loading Advertising Age This is the third installment of Ad Age Ad Review columnist Bob Garfield s Chronicles of the Media Revolution series in which he explores ongoing technological upheaval across the media and marketing industries His two earlier installments are 04 24 2007 01 55 PM sociological and economic transformation including but not limited to a reallocation of the 67 billion that advertisers spent on TV in the U S last year Don t sell Google short That upheaval would require a couple of things to fall into place 1 a business model to convert what is basically an overgrown fan site into an actual advertising medium and 2 a tectonic change in the worldwide media economy But don t sell Google short Not long ago all it had was a search algorithm and a cool logo Now after reinventing online advertising it has revenue of 9 3 billion a year and good reason to believe that neither of those daunting prerequisites is out of the question Inside the New World of Listenomics Until about five minutes ago remember almost all video entertainment How the Open Source content was produced and distributed by Hollywood Period That time is Revolution Impacts Your Brands over There was a time when advertisers could count on mass audiences for Bob Garfield s Chaos Scenario what Hollywood thought we should be watching on TV That time is all but A Look at the Marketing over There was a time when broadband penetration was too slight and Industry s Coming Disaster bandwidth costs too prohibitive for video to be watched online That time is Garfield s weekly columns and daily blog can be found in the Bob Garfield section of this AdAge com website ALSO Comment on this article in the Your Opinion box below sooooo over The era of the creepy blue light leaking out of every living room window on the block is now officially at an end says my pal and occasional colleague Steve Rosenbaum founder of video sharing startup Magnify net and one of the inventors a decade ago of citizen video The simple wonderful delirious fact is that people like you and me can now make and share content Delirious or not it s a fact that Buzzmachine com s Jeff Jarvis believes has changed the meaning of TV Just as our kids don t