To date, the New Media have gone through three phases, talk radio, cable news, and the center-right blogosphere. New Media 4.0 is now being born.

At the beginning of 2005 YouTube was nothing. At the end of 2005, it was serving 3 million videos a day. Six months later it was serving 50 million videos a day. Now it is the fastest growing online brand in some markets, according to Nielsen, and is serving 100 million videos a day and more. In less than a year, YouTube has gone from a $3.5 million first round of funding with Sequoia Capital to being worth likely over $1 billion. Meanwhile, Google alone is serving over 3 billion searches a month, and enjoying steady growth of 30% or so. And Apple’s video iPod with an 80 gig hard drive and movie downloads is only the beginning of the portable revolution.

Given the market opportunity generated by the appalling performance of the MSM in recent times (AP, Reuters, NYT, alphabet networks, even Fox), we fully expect to see venues like Roger Simon’s Pajamas Media, Michelle Malkin, or John McIntyre and Tom Bevan’s RealClearPolitics, among others, to produce daily newscasts and periodic in-depth video reports on topics of public debate. The market opportunity is undeniable. You can see the decline in viewership of network news in a chart here; we expect that decline to accelerate, given the astounding growth of interesting New Media alternatives, such as the Pajamas week-in-review podcast. Nature and markets abhor a vacuum.

We are entering yet another growth spurt in the life-cycle of the New Media, whose rise we have chronicled from time to time. From talk radio, cable news, and the center-right blogosphere, something new and perhaps even more ubiquitous may be about to emerge. We don’t have anything particularly unique to say about the birth of New Media 4.0, but we wanted to note its arrival before it all becomes history.

UPDATE

As of New Year’s Day 2012, YouTube is viewed 3 billion times a day, and Google processes 30 billion searches a month. Pretty impressive growth.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 23rd, 2006 at 5:09 pm and is filed under art, culture, business, General, MSM, New Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.