From the Church of the Customer Blog comes a comparison by Ben McConnell between traffic to the New York Times site and YouTube. The New York Times has been around 155 years. YouTube is six months old. The graph of traffic speaks for itself.
As McConnell says: “comparing the two is like putting Pamela Anderson up against Margaret Thatcher”. Maybe. The reality is that YouTube is getting the traffic and advertisers like traffic.
What consumers want from the media is changing. They are seeking engagement beyond voting someone off a reality TV show or voting in a half-baked newspaper poll. Social media like YouTube is the new game in town and mainstream outlets will need to move quickly if they are to attract the kind of online traffic advertisers are looking for. Every day, legal issues notwithstanding, the News Corp. purchase last year of MySpace seems prescient.