Video of LeBron James getting dunked on by Jordan Crawford finally hit the web on Wednesday, to the shock and awe of absolutely no one. But the dunk itself became the secondary story, as two separate clips of it were released just minutes apart on two different websites.TMZ was promoting the fact that they had secured the clip, but ended up releasing it about four hours earlier than they had planned. That's because a previously unheralded site -- ebaumnation.com -- had secured the rights to a higher-quality video, and was set to go live with it themselves.
As you might imagine, the right to be first with a video like this is going to cost something. Here's how much these two sites reportedly paid for the honor.
According to The Sporting Blog, TMZ paid $3000 for their clip, and ebaumnation.com paid $5000 for theirs. There were also offers from ESPN of $500, and Gawker Media (parent of Deadspin) was willing to go as high as $10,000.
There's an additional piece at TSB discussing what all of this "checkbook journalism" means, but I think in the end, it's really just using your advertising dollars to pay an independent source. With ebaumnation.com garnering over two million page views themselves for the video -- not to mention the many more their watermarked clip received from being uploaded to YouTube or various other websites -- one could easily argue that the five grand they paid for it was ultimately money well-spent.
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