Can't buy me...community?

Terry Heaton is a media specialist whose background is in television, but who is entirely up to speed with social media and its implications. He writes of the case of YouTube, the user-contributed videos website that very quickly grew to six million daily users, and which now serves more than 35,000 videos per day:

[T]hose numbers have caught the attention of the mainstream, and we’re about to see clone after clone being created. Why? It’s the numbers. It’s like mass media scouts are scanning the horizon and shouting back to the tribe, “There! There’s the audience we’ve been losing.”

Meanwhile, there are reports that youTube is raising as much as $25 million in venture money. Why? It’s the numbers. Is youTube the new Amazon, the new eBay, or the new mySpace? This is a VERY tricky question, because with money comes old school rules, and if there ever was an anti-establishment site, it’s youTube. Remember that this site was built for user-contributed videos. The deep pockets that are drooling over it could give a rat’s ass about such. They want those numbers to present their OWN videos, and that’s a problem. The same users who made youTube “successful” could just as easily turn their allegiance elsewhere.

Terry laments the fact that so many companies are desperate to purchase communities developed by other entities, yet want nothing to do with exploration and experimentation of their own. Our quotation here earlier of Jeff Jarvis’s contention that you can’t own the community; the community owns the community is one that such companies would do well to heed. In a time where individuals online have not only asserted control but wield it with a growing certainty that it is their right (and it is), it is easier than ever to be faced with millions of turned backs. And no receipt can get you your money back on that kind of loss.