What Does Youtube Have To Do With Saudi Arabia?

A whole new world was born here….

In 1936, Saudi Arabia was listed as one of the poorest countries in the world.

It was little more than barren desert.

It’s GNP was far south of Somalia’s.

It was sparsely inhabited by a few nomadic tribes subsisting on dates and camel’s milk.

It was an economic basket-case with few prospects.

A few oil engineers from Aramco, the Arab-American Oil Company thought otherwise.

They thought there just might be oil underneath those barren and unproductive Arabian sands.

Few other’s agreed.

In 1936, after many dry wells and a great deal of money and time expended, the Aramco engineers dropped their 7th well in the Dammam region near Dhahran.  They hit it it big.

The well was called Dammam 7, and it would go on to prove that nearly one-fourth of all the oil reserves in the world lay under the Arabian desert.

It was the beginning of the ‘oil age’ in which we now live.

The discovery of the vast petroleum reserves beneath Dammam 7 would change the world forever (not to mention Saudi Arabia).

Up until now, we have all inhabited a media desert.

We may think that we have been inundated with media, but when we look back on this era 100 years hence, we will see that we also lived in a time of media poverty.

The idea that the vast bulk of our video-driven entertainment and content come from a tiny handful of ‘media companies’ will seem ludicrous.

And where is our Dammam 7?

Where are the great untapped reserves of content and entertainment and news and information?

As the oil in the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula, they are right beneath our feet.

In response to yesterday’s blog, ‘Kenny’ wrote that it was misleading for me to point to the 56 billion hours of video uploaded to Youtube becasue the vast majority of it (if not all of it) cannot hold a candle to what the ‘professionals’ can produce.

This is true.

The content is currently terrible.

But the potential is almost unimaginable.

Quite literally, in the past 5 years, billions of people have created video content and uploaded it so share.

They did this unbidden.

No one asked them to do it.

No one paid them for it.

It wasn’t a job.

It was a passion.

It was driven by a deep seated desire to ‘make video’

This is remarkable.

This is, in fact, unprescedented in human history.

A massive, almost instantaneous upwelling and outpouring of creativity in vast, almost incomprehensible volumes.

This tells us something very very basic and fundamental is going on.

This tells us that the combination of Youtube and cheap video cameras and edits has tapped into a massive reservoir of potential creative content, much as the wellhead at Dammam 7 tapped into a massive and as yet untapped source of global energy.

As with crude oil, this vast creative resource now has to be extracted and refined and distributed.

This talent now has to be extracted, refined and distributed in the same way.

And that ‘cracking’ of the talent pool has to begin with training.

The desire to create content and the ability to create compelling content are close, but not the same.

That’s why we’re here.

That’s what we are dedicated to doing.

And just as Dammam 7 was the beginning of a global revolution – the oil-driven economy, so too we are going to see a global revolution in communications, education, news and entertainment.

The world has never seemed so promising.