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2006: Media Story Of The Year

YouTube's $1.65 billion sale to Google was a big reason, but not the only one

By Dylan Stableford – December 20, 2006
googtube_logo_players.jpgThe votes are in for what was a predictably wild and wooly media year. To cap it off, we'll be unveiling the winners (and losers) of  mediabistro.com's first-ever year-end media awards all week. Today's award: Media Story of the Year.

Here's a timeline that may or may not make you angry:

  • January 2005: YouTube housed in a Menlo Park garage.
  • May 2005: YouTube site "up-and-running."
  • December 2005: Official launch.
  • August 2006: Co-founder Chad Hurley tells Charlie Rose he sees YouTube "building the next generation platform to serve media worldwide."
  • October 2006: Google buys YouTube for $1.65 billion.
    • It's hard to imagine a media story bigger in 2006 than YouTube's $1.65 billion sale to Google. But the sale was really only another part of the Web video juggernaut's folklore. The first full year of YouTube's existence saw founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen hobnobbing with media moguls in Sun Valley while its users were uploading some of the year's biggest media moments to YouTube for the world to consume, turning YouTube into the closest thing the planet has ever had to a global channel.

    In fact, most of the media's biggest stories in 2006 have YouTube to thank: Stephen Colbert's takedown of President Bush at the White House Correspondent's dinner, Bill Clinton's finger-wag on Fox News — and who could forget the "macaca" moment — all were streamed and beamed by YouTube, and promptly caught fire. And the company's sale to Google, despite its wopping price tag, no doubt turned the screws in big-media board rooms, particularly at Google's would-be rival, Yahoo!, where executives presumably had to face the question: Why them, not us?

    But not everyone in the media was enamored with YouTube. Dallas Mavericks owner-cum-blogger Mark Cuban hammered away at YouTube's Dirk Nowitzki-sized problem: copyright infringement. Time Warner's Dick Parsons stated publicly that the price tag was too steep for a company that had yet to turn a profit. And NBC's Brian Williams, in nominating "You" for Time magazine's POY, warned that "We're choosing cat videos over well thought-out, well-reported evening newscasts ... I believe ['You'] is tearing us apart."

    media_story_chart.jpg 

    Despite Katie Couric's overhyped jump to CBS, her respectable finish in the voting for story of the year should give her some hope that while the "vultures" may circle, they're secretly rooting for her too. And Borat would've been our pick for story of the year for Sascha Baron Cohen's awe-inspiring job of staying in character for weeks on end.

    Media Bust Of The Year: O.J. Book
    Media Scandal Of The Year: O.J. Book/News Corp. Debacle
    Media Sixth Man (Or Woman): Ben Karlin 
    TOMORROW: 2006 Media MVP

    [Dylan Stableford is mediabistro.com's managing editor, media news. He can be reached at dylan AT mediabistro DOT com.]
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