If I were going to start a band, I think I’d name it “Content for Eyeballs.”

I was reading a great article about how such wildly popular sites such as Facebook and YouTube struggle with the mounting, suffocating costs of expanded bandwidth without a proper review stream to offset it.  Growth in online ad review began slowing it’s assent early last year and limped into the end of 2008 showing a fairly anemic 10% increase.  Meanwhile spending on traditional broad media continued to drop like my 401K.  Meanwhile the cost of hosting and streaming the endless amount of stuff we post on Facebook and YouTube may not require any wood pulp for paper or barrels of ink to produce, but it takes an acre of servers and millions of dollars in bandwidth daily.

Read the story here.  Or listen to the podcast like I did. (The podcast killed the online article faster than the online article killed the newspaper – discuss.)

The point here is the model of trading Content for Eyeballs could be failing in the digital arena even faster than it is failing in the sickly world of print and television.  So be careful to fall head-over-heals ga-ga in love for the new channel to save our industry. We may be hopping from one troubled media outlet to the other hoping to find a platform that sustains past, say next quarter

I can't muster any sympathy or fear for the young turks behind FB.  They'll manage to survive longer than the Des Moines Register, for example. Because they have a culture of change, risk and adaptability that marketers must now embrace to survive.