March 15, 2019 was the biggest day in YouTube history. A terrorist was about to enter a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. He killed 50 people that day, but before he started the massacre, he hooked up his camera while he was still in the car. Before leaving, he said, “Remember guys, subscribe to Pewdiepie.” That phrase was a meme about who was the biggest YouTuber on the platform at the time. But uttered by a terrorist before he opened fire, it wasn’t funny. Not only that: YouTube had been the killer’s preferred platform during his training.
“Until recently, practically nobody took YouTube seriously,” writes American journalist Mark Bergen in his book Like, Comment, Subscribe, subtitled Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination, with no English translation as yet. It’s the closest thing to a history of the platform. In March 2019, the platform got serious: “A staffer told me that before these reviews, the world would view YouTube history the way we view cars in front of seatbelts,” says Bergen. Until then, YouTube had played ambiguously with the videos allowed on its platform. The overhaul of the rules changed and the company began to take the red lines more seriously. Racial extremism would no longer have it so easy.
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“It was one of his biggest calls for attention in terms of content moderation,” Bergen tells EL PAÍS via video call from London, where he’s just moved. “Perhaps the pandemic and the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement in the US were the other two significant ones. They really changed their rules and system. Today it looks like a completely different platform.”
What was YouTube like and what impact did it have? In his book, Bergen traces the path that led from the foundation of the platform by three young people in 2005 to one that seems self-evident today (a page for posting videos), but was much more complex at the time. They didn’t do it from a garage, but they had quite a few rats between the pizza boxes.
In 2006, Google tried to trump Youube with Google Video, but they never succeeded. It was easier for them to buy it. At just under a year old, YouTube had its own character, where almost all users uploaded videos: “Years before Instagram influencers and TikTok stars, these young creators invented a new model of fame, attracting an audience not yet accustomed to watching hours of his.” Spending days hopping absent-mindedly on the internet,” writes Bergen.
Google was already a multi-million dollar giant in 2006. The YouTube fit was difficult. From the beginning began their complex, contradictory and flawed decisions that have made the platform what it is today, namely at the level of the audiovisual competition that ridiculed it in 2006. Few would have thought that the combination of internet video and unleashing the creativity of millions of people in front of a camera could change the course of entertainment: “It was a radical shift in the way we think about entertainment. There’s no denying that it has opened up careers for people who didn’t have careers and may never have had ones in traditional media,” says Bergen.
These were some of his decisions, milestones and insights in YouTube’s rise over those 18 years:
1. The “YouTubers” are coming
“It’s hard to imagine CBS or Netflix airing a video of a trans woman ripping off Hegel in lingerie or Hammurabi’s Code with cat-eye contact lenses,” Bergen writes. Youtubers is something that would never have existed without YouTube. Few executives would have believed that a kid joking in front of a screen, or someone talking for two hours about obscure theorems, could interest millions of people.
Today, the biggest YouTuber is Mr. Beast, who hardly features in the book due to his recent success. His videos are incredible (“I Survived 50 Hours in Antarctica” and “1,000 Blind People See for the First Time” are the last two) and are a bit closer to the YouTube original, which Bergen repeatedly refers to as “dogs on skateboards”. Era. , with a sense for funny videos and little more.
“Mr Beast is fascinating and I don’t think I understand it very well,” says Bergen. “You should talk to 12-year-olds to understand it. It’s like he’s a bit charismatic, but not quite. It basically works like a machine: it examines all the data and optimizes everything from thumbnails to video creation,” he adds.
2. YouTube is not just made up of “YouTubers”
YouTube is a great collection of human memories today, as the book says. It’s difficult to remember a World Cup game, a teenage song, someone playing video games, or a funny video and there isn’t a copy on YouTube. Its search engine is the second most used in the world, after Google, the company that owns YouTube.
But there are two other categories that carry particular weight on YouTube, the book notes: children’s and educational channels. Some kids channels earn more than traditional YouTubers: At the end of 2020, the top five most watched channels were for preschoolers. YouTube, for example, found that millions of kids could endlessly watch videos of anonymous hands opening surprises or another kid playing games they wanted. Arguably the most popular children’s channel, Ryan’s World, has a surprise egg and slide video that has been viewed 2 billion times. The most popular Mr. Beast video has been viewed 378 million times.
This children’s hit spawned hugely successful channels that showed bizarre relationships between adults in celebrity costumes and other shady variants, in some cases with salacious comments below the videos. Here, too, YouTube had to act decisively. But it wasn’t just YouTube. The US government also applied a law that limited the benefits of these channels for advertising: “The only real regulation in the US is the COPPA Act, which protects children’s privacy. Everything else was just talk after talk. They should have seen those strange canals from the inside. As far as I know there are executives who were surprised by what happened and I think that speaks to them being quite naïve about how the world works and how their platform works with us,” says Bergen.
The educational portion of YouTube was “a missed opportunity,” according to Bergen. “They tried many times to become a big brand in the education market to get the resume, but they didn’t make it,” says Bergen. “There are a lot of educators who make a lot of money from ads, but they haven’t gone mainstream or invested in them,” he adds.
3. The two most important decisions
When YouTube was a few years old, management made two decisions that sparked a chain of events and led to what it is today: change the metric from clicks to “duration watched” and pay creators half the advertising revenue generated by their videos. Suddenly, the clickbait ended with misleading headlines and millions of people trying to create content that might interest the platform’s audience.
“People probably think time is a better metric, but they haven’t thought about the consequences or side effects like security or content moderation,” says Bergen. “The problems were in a different category: it used to be spam, now it was hate speech or misinformation,” he adds.
Something similar happened with paying YouTubers: Suddenly YouTube had white racists and suspected pedophiles as “business partners”. “It’s what’s happening now with Spotify with Joe Rogan, albeit in a different order,” says Bergen.
4. A celebration of technology
In 2010, 100 hours of video was uploaded to YouTube every minute. A few years ago, nobody would have thought that this was technically possible: A common joke on YouTube was initially that the platform would break the internet. By 2020, that number had quintupled. YouTube’s servers are so reliable that companies upload entire hidden camera loops and keep them private, Bergen explains. Getting YouTube up and running was a key to success.
“That wasn’t their only priority, because in their first decade they also dealt with the business side, but most of all they wanted to make it work,” says Bergen. “Larry Page’s obsession [cofundador de Google] was to cap the upload speed to ensure it could be viewed instantly with no latency.”
5. Why it was underrated
Susan Wojcicki, YouTube executive for 10 years through February 2023, never went to Congress to testify. After Trump’s election, in the midst of the network crisis, YouTube went unnoticed. White and Islamic extremism, disinformation, hate speech lived quietly on the web for years. His motto was that the audience rules and if someone wanted to see a video that said uncomfortable things, it was for a reason. “It’s a ship with no rudder and no clear stance on its absolutely vital role in the broader geosocial-political landscape,” said one staffer at the time.
Why was YouTube spared? Bergen sees several reasons. First, videos are harder to analyze than Facebook or Twitter posts. Second, it’s part of Google, which has faced other, more serious antitrust issues before. Third, politicians used it more as a service, like maps or searches, so it didn’t seem dangerous. For the youngest, on the other hand, it is the television. And fourth, Wojcicki’s discretion was important. “It was better for a senator to mess with Mark Zuckerberg because he sold more. Most had an opinion about him. But an average voter doesn’t know who Wojcicki is. In the book I say that someone in Washington wanted to set up a few meetings for him, but nobody knew who he was,” the journalist explains.
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