I was recently discussing the Google/YouTube thing with a friend, which in turn became a discussion about “new media” and the effect of the internet on innovation in this space. My friend had an interesting comment: “It’s just an interesting philosophical question – whether the value on the internet is in creating the market between creators and consumers, to the point that the creator themselves is marginalized? Or will all this swing back the other way at some point?”

This reminded me of a topic Lawrence Lessig often speaks about – the re-emergence of read/write culture. To get the complete perspective, check out this talk by Larry at Wikimania 2006. I will summarize briefly here.

During the 20th century there was a shift towards “read-only culture”, where consumers received all of their information from single, one-way (read-only) sources (such newspapers, magazines, TV etc). There was almost no back-channel – very little contribution back from consumers.

During the beginning of the 21st century things have started moving back towards a “read/write culture”, where everyone contributes as much as they consume (in theory). Lessig goes further to say that the 20th century was an anomoly, and throughout history humans have followed more of the read/write paradigm.

As a side note, this is a key motivation behind the creative commons project. Current intellectual property law seems to favor read-only culture, and so Lessig is championing for reform.

Thinking along these lines, it seems that with the “new media” there is no longer a distinction between “creators” and “consumers”. Individuals are empowered to contribute as much as they consume. I read a statistic recently (although the source was not referenced) that 62% of the content an average 21-year-old reads online today is produced by someone they know.

An interesting consequence is that under this model, innovation really only happens with the distributor – finding new ways to connect creators and consumers – rather than with the creators as has been the case in the past.
This model goes some way towards explaining how a company like YouTube – which is really just a repository of content from other people – can go from a $15M valuation to a $1.65B valuation in less than a year. While this does seem very ‘bubble’ like, maybe the strategic value of being number one in this new media ‘distribution’ space is worth this much to Google…