Ever the Master of brevity in the blogosphere, Seth Godin points out a press release from CBS that highlights their enormous success on YouTube, including a quote from YouTube brass. And then he speaks volumes, by saying almost nothing at all:

“Think about that for a second.”

I applaud CBS for changing their stripes and trying a new way of distributing their content, and I’m especially proud that they are willing to publicize that such a huge audience prefers a different model from the one that has kept them safe and warm in their ivory towers for so long.

Score one for new media.

But perhaps the best news for CBS is the fact that viewership is up, according to their ratings. It proves what many of us have been saying all along; Giving a valuable chunk of information away will only help business, and not hurt it. It builds trust, and exposes your message to a larger potential audience. It puts collateral into the hands of your would-be evangelists.

Now it’s the music industry’s turn to learn this lesson, right Mack?

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 22nd, 2006 at 12:26 pm and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.