 Hi, this is Gerhard Leonhard, Media Futurist in Basel, Switzerland. Welcome to another take of GertTube.com today about social networks and why I think that social networks are the new broadcasters. I think many of you, of course, are active on social networks, not just Facebook, but also QQ and Nixie and all the local variants of it, whether it's Studio Default Set or many others or LinkedIn or Zing and so on. If you're looking at this slide of Facebook, which I got from Monty Metzger in Germany, a very nice slide share on his slide share account, you can see how we're all starting to interrelate to other people. I mean, it's really an amazing phenomena of the six degrees, as it was called in the 80s, now that the average person is spending a huge amount of time on the Internet connecting with others, it's about two hours a day now in the U.S. for people between 15 and 35. And the biggest growth of social networks is not the kids, which is very interesting. For example, Facebook, the growth is 30 to 55-year-old people. So it's no longer the kids that are doing it, it's no longer happening on the computer, it's happening on mobile devices. And these social networks are extremely powerful. Facebook, roughly 700 billion minutes spent a month, every fifth minute on the Internet is spent on Facebook. And so people are spending, dividing a lot more attention towards the web and mechanisms like Facebook and actually beating television or being in parallel with television, as for example, many people are using ITV and ITV Live at the same time, which is a social network around ITV. Now, Facebook is becoming a huge example of what's happening basically when Facebook goes public and they raise the money to do so. They become, with one stroke, the biggest broadcaster in the world. The biggest TV station, the biggest radio station, and the biggest place for renting books and reading books, reading magazines, watching TV shows, doing all that stuff on Facebook, along, of course, with, you guessed it, Google and YouTube. So what's happening here is that because we're so tightly connected and we actually have friends on Facebook, we form relationships and tribes, we can send stuff back and forth to each other and I'm much more likely to watch your video if it comes from a friend than seeing it by Googling and watching a strange video I don't care about. But if my friend says, this is a much, much, must watch video about the future of, say, Switzerland, right, then I would take a look at it. And so Facebook is becoming a broadcaster because the rights can be purchased and bought against advertising. Facebook has the best possible advertising audience in the world. Facebook will make more money than Google with advertising based on the data that they have about us. And Google right now is making over $2.7 billion a month in advertising. So we're going to see, as you can see on this slide, this idea of saying, you know, we have big broadcasts with NBC, we have ZTF, we have BBC, we have Canadian broadcasts, those big corporations, but now we have small broadcasters, millions of them broadcasting. You know, 70% of YouTube content is not the mainstream content. It's all the niche stuff, the small stuff, the travel, the travel trips from Buenos Aires all the way down to showing how to fix a motorcycle. So now we have all these little, these small circles of small producers coming forward and going directly to Facebook and YouTube and Twitter. There will be Twitter television clearly in the near future. Twitter is already what I call Twitter News Network, TNN. And we're going to see this trend continue. As you can see on this slide, traditional television is on the decline. People are still watching it, of course, and for that reason they've kept their advertising value. What's happening now is that people are on the internet, especially kids, and on television and on their computer and on SMS and PlayStation and so on at the same time. So they're actually doing it in parallel. This is why they're still getting good ratings on television. But imagine what happens when internet access becomes really cheap, devices become really cheap. You know, why should I watch regular television whenever show I want is available over the top in some place like Hulu or Boxy or Dropbox or any of those places. This is a question, of course, of rights, but Facebook and the likes of those will solve this problem of rights. So I think social networks are becoming the next big broadcasters and they're becoming social broadcasters, which currently doesn't exist in regular television. Very, very big step forward in television, I think, to be interactive, to talk to each other about the show. And you can already see, if you go to CES in Las Vegas, every year television gets more connected. Now you can watch television and on the bottom of the screen you can see your flicker photos of the stars that are in the same television show. You can see their Facebook profile. You can like them while you watch the TV show and so on and so on. So this side shows what's happening and as far as social networks concerned, they're becoming a lot more powerful than search. So Facebook is now very soon going to equal the market views of Google in terms of selling stuff, in terms of presenting stuff, and in terms of finding and being found. Facebook will be the same and there will be a third line, that's Twitter, and a fourth line, that's QQ, and a fifth line, which is Baidu and so on. The Chinese variants and other variants from all over the world. So that is clearly a trend. Social networks becoming broadcasters. That's the way we should think of them. If we can't get distribution for our movies through Brandovista, we can try the web and this is currently quite difficult because there's so little money in it, but that will change when the audience shifts for marketing purposes. Now this slide spells it out clearly what Mark Zuckerberg's looks. Plans are at Facebook. He says he expects his company to make billions and billions of dollars turning the TV news film and music industry upside down. So clearly Facebook is looking this direction of changing the media business just like Google has changed it. Clearly this is a declaration that we should take note of if you're in this business, you've got to make deals with Facebook. It's a distribution channel. So finally, as far as social networks are concerned, one thing that's really working there is the interaction, how people relate and how they talk to each other, and that leads to a very simple statement, which is a good thing at the end here, is that interaction now comes before transaction. In other words, I don't buy anything if I haven't talked about it with somebody before. I won't actually join anything unless we've had a conversation, which is pretty much what has always been true. But now on the web, it's really true, interaction before transaction. As I said in the other video earlier, talking about personal branding, Starbucks has about 20 million users on Facebook, likes on Facebook, and those people buy twice as much coffee as the ones that don't. So clearly interaction comes before transaction. If you aren't interacting with your customers and your fans, you're in deep trouble because you will not have transactions in the long run. This is why we already have hundreds of companies selling on Facebook including Electronic Arts, Delta Airlines. You can buy your tickets on Facebook. You don't have to go to the website. So interaction before transaction. Final point here on the slide of the Facebook Monster, which I think I got from Wall Street Journal, so thanks for letting me use this. Mark Zuckerberg says, we have the most powerful distribution mechanism that has been created in a generation. This is quite clearly pointing towards a simple fact. Facebook is a broadcaster. Facebook is replacing ownership of stuff with access to it, which is a really, really important thing for the future of content, which I'll talk about in one of my next videos. Thanks very much for listening. Go to mediafuturists.com to find out more. I'm on Slideshare, G Leonhardt. I'm on Twitter, G Leonhardt. I'm everywhere, G Leonhardt. Thanks very much for listening. See you down the road.