The iPhone & the Viral Video
News reporting appears to have reached a new milestone, made clear by how a few videos posted to YouTube drew enough attention by mainstream media to help drive down the stock price of one of the world's biggest corporations.
The reporting over "bendgate" has cooled off quite a bit thanks to what may be more level-headed analysis, including that from Consumer Reports. It's analysis shows the bending of phone casings is not unique to the iPhone 6 Plus.
The videos and a flurry of comment in forums and on social media, as well as the release of a flawed update to the phone's operating system, are credited with helping force Apple's stock price down by nearly 4% at one point on Friday.
Forced to Respond to "Extremely Rare" Problem
Apple says the problem is "extremely rare," even going so far as to invite reporters to its testing facility to show off just what the company puts its products through before release.
As of this posting, Apple stock has largely recovered with analysts saying the lower price represented a great opportunity to buy up its shares. Attention can now turn to this new phenomenon we now know as "viral videos."
There's no doubt we're in a new age where anyone can play reporter with a quick post to any one of a dozen social networking sites. We put the question of just what it takes to make a video go viral to one of these new "stars" of the Internet, Ti Stewart.
What it Takes to Make a "Viral Video"
Stewart is one of a new breed of performers who says she makes several thousand dollars a month just by regularly posting commentary to her YouTube channel. With some 90,000 subscribers, she's had her share of videos that have gone viral. It's anybody's guess, she says, as to what drives tens of thousands of people to watch and then share a video:
There's no doubt that the intense interest surrounding the highly anticipated release of the new iPhones along with news of the Apple Watch helped feed the desire on the part of people to search out independent news about the products. The question becomes just how much you want to trust what you're actually watching on the Internet.
We should note here that consumers started getting the majority of their information on major news stories from the Internet back in 2009. Pop Star Michael Jackson's death prompted so many people to search his name that Google thought it to be a bot attack. It was only a day later that we learned more people searched the web for news of his death than those who got it from mainstream media, a first for a major news story.
New Technology, New Era
I draw some parallels from this era of information technology to the introduction of the printing press in the mid-1800's. It wasn't long afterward that the term "yellow journalism" was coined, a reference to how cheap paper turned yellow after a few days. Some, like William Randolph Hearst, became rich with sensational coverage of stories which contained little fact.
It might be worth pointing out here that YouTube is owned by Google, one of Apple's most fierce competitors and the originator of the Android mobile operating system.
