14,400 hours a day????

I just read an article by Greg Sandoval on CNET about Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google and how elusive profits are from YouTube.

Buried in the article parenthetically is this little gem: More than 10 HOURS of video is uploaded to YouTube every MINUTE. That works out to more than 14,400 hours of new video every day! I am still trying to get my head around this statistic. Making money from this plethora of video is apparently Google's number-one goal for this year and they have already started experimenting with different ad delivery solutions - but nothing has clicked yet. Literally or otherwise.

My take-away from this astounding statistic is the overwhelming willingness, even eagerness by the people formerly known as the audience (thanks to Terry Heaton for that phrase) are now participating because they can.

I’ll be the first to acknowledge that most of those 10 hours-per-minute is video you and I will never see – but that’s ultimately not the point. It’s really about the shift in ownership of content from mass media to the people, the leveling of the playing field when it comes to what the public views and appreciates as news and entertainment. It’s an extremely liberating development – but one that undermines the foundations of mass media as we have know it for the better part of 60 years.

This has import for all of us – and changes the way we do the news business irrevocably. And the idealist in me thinks it will all be for the better – it will just be painful living through the transition.

Consumers can be expected to accelerate their participation as the tools to contribute get easier to use, cheaper to acquire and increasingly routine. Technology already exists that allows LIVE feeds from webcams and cellphones and this will only become more pervasive in time. It will change the way news is gathered as radically as the web has changed the way it is distributed.

The great unanswered question is what role traditional media will play in this revolution – and as I’ve written before, there are a lot of attempts to answer that question. I don’t have any clear vision other than firmly believing that quality counts. Real journalism counts. Untethered creation and distribution of news content in the hands of the news consumers is ultimately a good thing.

As one blogger wisely put it more than a year ago – if my daughter skins her knee at school, that’s my top news story of the day. Soon I can fully expect video on-demand of this vitally important breaking news when I want it and where I want it.