For sale: You and I.
They are calling today Merger Monday and the stock market is booming. The surge is largely due to the announcement that AOL has purchased the citizen journalism driven site HuffingtonPost.com for $315M. That’s Three-hundred-and-fifteen-million. Dollars. For a blog.
Actually, the $315M that changed hands last night in a private AOL Superbowl party was not just a bunch of blog posts. The $315M was paid in exchange for you and I. That’s right…while we all watched the world’s top football players grind it out for the championship, we were bartered for more than a quarter billion dollars. Welcome to the Digital Age.
In this new post-industrial era of social media, Twitter-fueled revolutions and viral videos, WE are the new form of currency.
Who and what you know, what you talk about…things you share on the web…it all makes up what these New Media brokers call “audience”. Audience is exchanged these days just like gold and copper and corn. It has become a commodity, that you drive.
Big brands, local businesses, politicians and every possible advertiser in between all need YOU and I to talk about stuff. They need us to comment, Tweet, Like and post to our blog what they are trying to say.
The next time you log on to Facebook, consider this. Facebook is worth several billion dollars…largely because of…YOU.
Spread the word.
