• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, October 11, 2006

Google's $1.65 billion purchase of YouTube continues to roil the industry, with other media companies wondering what this new turn of events means for them. News Corp., for one, seems especially peeved about the deal. News Corp. executives had tried to buy YouTube themselves, but were told the company wasn't for sale, according to The Wall Street Journal. When reports of the negotiations between Google and YouTube broke Friday, News Corp. attempted to insert itself in the talks, but was ignored, according to the Journal. Now, News Corp. reportedly is considering disabling links to YouTube videos on MySpace pages.

It's hard to overstate just how stupid such a move would be. If News Corp. imagines for one second that MySpace users would simply accept that type of censorship, the executives running the company are woefully out of touch with their users. The execs are also weirdly disconnected from the very nature of social networking if they think they can play traffic cop to prevent users from visiting one of the most popular sites ever. The far more likely outcome is that users will abandon MySpace, not YouTube. After all, there are other social networking sites. Google itself runs one, Orkut--which is wildly popular in Brazil. News Corp. and other media companies obviously need to figure out where they fit in this new landscape.

But it should be just as obvious that they're not going to be able to diminish YouTube's popularity by trying to block their members from linking to it. That's exactly the type of desperation move that will accelerate an exodus from MySpace to a newer, less restrictive environment.

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