YouTube
YouTube is one of the most popular video-sharing sites
URL = http://www.youtube.com/
Description
"Watch : Instantly find and watch 1000's of fast streaming videos. Upload : Quickly upload and tag videos in almost any video format. Share : Easily share your videos with family, friends, or co-workers.
You can embed YouTube videos in any website by a little code snippet."
History
John Seabrook:
"YouTube was created by three former employees of PayPal, in a Silicon Valley garage, in early 2005. According to two of the founders, Chad Hurley and Steven Chen, a graphic designer and a software engineer, respectively, the idea grew out of a dinner party at Chen’s home in San Francisco, in the winter of 2004-05. Guests had made videos of one another, but they couldn’t share them easily. The founders envisioned a video version of Flickr, a popular photo-sharing site. All the content on the site would be user-generated: “Real personal clips that are taken by everyday people,” as Hurley described his vision.
The third founder, Jawed Karim, also a software engineer, had an additional source of inspiration: Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” on CBS’s broadcast of the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show. The incident spawned an enormous amount of commentary, an F.C.C. fine, and a lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court, but if you missed the live broadcast you were out of luck.
On the evening of April 23, 2005, Karim uploaded the first video to YouTube—an eighteen-second clip of him, standing in front of the elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo, wearing an ill-fitting hiking jacket. He says, “The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks, and that’s cool,” smirks a little, and ends with “And that’s pretty much all there is to say.” Civilization would never be the same.
By the time a beta version of YouTube went live, in May, 2005, its archive held several dozen videos, supplied mostly by the founders and their friends; Chen contributed a couple of his cat, Stinky. Not surprisingly, traffic was light. YouTube was like “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” without the fun. The founders had no outside financing at the time, and they were paying for equipment and bandwidth with the payouts they had earned from PayPal when eBay bought the company, in 2002; some of the costs went on Chen’s credit card. The situation looked bleak. In a video shot that month in a garage, the founders discuss their predicament. Chen says, “I was getting pretty depressed toward the end of last week.” Someone says, “This is lame.” The founders decided that videos of good-looking babes might help, and they placed ads on Craigslist, offering attractive women a hundred dollars for ten videos. No one responded.
On June 20th, Karim wrote in an e-mail to Chen and Hurley, “If we want to sign up lots of users who keep coming back, we have to target the people who will never upload a video in their life. And those are really valuable because they spend time watching.” What the watchers wanted was music videos, skits from “Saturday Night Live,” and episodes of “South Park”—professional content. “And if they watch, then it’s just like TV, which means lots of value,” Karim added.
In e-mails that later became the centerpiece of a billion-dollar copyright-infringement suit brought by Viacom against YouTube, in 2007, both Karim and Chen advocated a laissez-faire response toward copyrighted content. If the content owners asked YouTube to take a video down, the site would comply; otherwise, the founders would leave it. Hurley presciently wrote, “OK man, save your meal money for some lawsuits.” But he, too, went along with the relaxed approach.
In June, the site incorporated a number of new features, including the ability to embed YouTube videos in other sites and links between videos, and traffic began to pick up. By December, YouTube had several million views a day. That month, “Lazy Sunday,” a skit from “Saturday Night Live,” in which Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell rap about eating cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery and going to a Sunday matinée of “The Chronicles of Narnia,” was posted on YouTube, and viewed more than five million times before it was removed at NBCUniversal’s request.
...
On June 20th, Karim wrote in an e-mail to Chen and Hurley, “If we want to sign up lots of users who keep coming back, we have to target the people who will never upload a video in their life. And those are really valuable because they spend time watching.” What the watchers wanted was music videos, skits from “Saturday Night Live,” and episodes of “South Park”—professional content. “And if they watch, then it’s just like TV, which means lots of value,” Karim added.
In e-mails that later became the centerpiece of a billion-dollar copyright-infringement suit brought by Viacom against YouTube, in 2007, both Karim and Chen advocated a laissez-faire response toward copyrighted content. If the content owners asked YouTube to take a video down, the site would comply; otherwise, the founders would leave it. Hurley presciently wrote, “OK man, save your meal money for some lawsuits.” But he, too, went along with the relaxed approach.
In June, the site incorporated a number of new features, including the ability to embed YouTube videos in other sites and links between videos, and traffic began to pick up. By December, YouTube had several million views a day. That month, “Lazy Sunday,” a skit from “Saturday Night Live,” in which Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell rap about eating cupcakes from Magnolia Bakery and going to a Sunday matinée of “The Chronicles of Narnia,” was posted on YouTube, and viewed more than five million times before it was removed at NBCUniversal’s request." (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/16/120116fa_fact_seabrook)
Business Model
Partner Program
"YouTube’s Partner Program, begun in 2007, has also flourished. YouTube sells advertising against popular channels created by homegrown YouTube stars—vloggers, sit-down comedians (a form of comedy unique to YouTube), mashup artists, bedroom auteurs, Mr. Fix-Its—and shares the revenues with the channels’ creators. For most of YouTube’s thirty thousand partners, this means a few hundred dollars a month, but the top five hundred partners earn more than a hundred thousand a year, and in some cases—Real Annoying Orange, a socially inept talking citrus who converses with other pieces of fruit; Shane Dawson, a madcap twenty-three-year-old sketch comedian; and Michelle Phan, a Vietnamese-American beauty guru, among them—they earn much more. Tweens are more familiar with these “welebrities” than they are with the stars on TV, a grim augury for the future of traditional television." (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/16/120116fa_fact_seabrook)
YouTube Channels
"While Kamangar and Kyncl were expanding YouTube’s movie titles, they were also exploring a more radical idea. What if YouTube could get professional writers, directors, and producers to create original content for the site? As Kyncl put it, “YouTube already had many channels, but they were used more as a way for content creators to set up their relationship with YouTube and upload videos, rather than as a discovery mechanism for the viewer.” YouTube would not want to own or develop the content. “We’re a technology company, and that’s not in our DNA,” Kyncl said. “The focus would be on developing channels, and brands, rather than individual shows.” He added, “There is a fundamental difference between the way AOL and Yahoo behave and the way we behave. They commission individual pieces of content. What we do is commission channels. We don’t tell people how to program the channels. We have certain volume requirements”—for instance, channels would be required to supply a minimum number of hours of programming each week—“but we are not making show-by-show decisions.”
Early in 2011, Kyncl began meeting content creators in a variety of media—film, TV, music, print—whiteboarding the future of television, and inviting them to participate in it by creating new YouTube channels. He offered several million dollars in funding, in the form of advances against future ad revenues, to be used as development money. Once the advances are earned back, YouTube will share ad revenues with the creators. YouTube will have an exclusive right to the content for a year, but the creators will retain ownership. YouTube will be responsible for selling ads but will not invest in promoting or marketing the channels in the way that traditional television channels do. (There will be no lavish premiere parties, and no billboards in Times Square.)
Michael Hirschorn was among the people who heard Kyncl’s presentation. Hirschorn began his career in print but made his name in television, at VH1, where, as the head of programming, he oversaw hits like “Flavor of Love” and “Celebrity Rehab.” He now runs an independent production company called Ish Entertainment. Larry Aidem, the former president of the Sundance Channel, knew Robert Kyncl, Hirschorn told me, and he said he thought they should meet. “None of the stuff Robert described was happening yet, of course, but I felt, having been late to several revolutions previously, that we needed to go all out for this,” Hirschorn said. “I called Larry and said, ‘We need to start a company now.’ ”
In all, Kyncl received more than a thousand proposals for new YouTube channels. He and his staff heard more than five hundred pitches, and winnowed them down to just over a hundred channels that would be awarded advances. Hirschorn attended more than twenty meetings. The winning proposals—branded “YouTube Original Channels”—were announced late on the Friday evening just before Halloween, at a time usually reserved for scandals and resignations, signalling that the third age of television, whatever it might be, would not be show business as usual.
Hirschorn and Aidem’s company, IconicTV, has been given advances for three channels: Life and Times, which will focus on Jay-Z’s cultural and artistic interests; 123UnoDosTres, an urban channel for Latin American young adults; and myISH, a channel for scouting musical talent. Madonna and her longtime manager, Guy Oseary, are developing a dance channel called Dance On. Amy Poehler is creating a channel called Smart Girls at the Party. Shaquille O’Neal is behind the Comedy Shaq Network, and there is a skateboard channel, RIDE, from Tony Hawk. Brian Bedol, who started the Classic Sports Network in the nineteen-nineties, and his partner Ken Lerer, the co-founder of the Huffington Post, got funds for four channels: Network A, an action-sports channel; KickTV, featuring soccer; Official Comedy, a standup-comedy showcase; and Look TV, a fashion-and-beauty channel. The Onion, Slate, and the Wall Street Journal are also creating channels, as are Hearst and Meredith. Even Disney, which had not made its films available to YouTube until November, agreed to partner with the company." (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/16/120116fa_fact_seabrook)
Stastistics
2012
"Today, it has eight hundred million unique users a month, and generates more than three billion views a day. Forty-eight hours of new video are uploaded to the site every minute. According to Nielsen, it drew eight times more video viewers last year than Hulu, which is jointly owned by NBCUniversal, News Corporation, and the Walt Disney Company, among others. It is the first truly global media platform on earth." (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/16/120116fa_fact_seabrook)
2006
September 2006 stats:
- In a single month the number of videos on the site grew 20% to 6.1 million
- YouTube has some 45 terabytes of videos
- Video views reached 1.73 billion
- 70% of YouTube's registered users are American, roughly 50% are under 20
- The total time people spent watching YouTube since it started last year is 9,305 years
( from the WSJ at [1])
Discussion
The Culture Role of YouTube
Some comments about the role of YouTube, the massively used videosharing site that was purchased by Google, plays in our culture, by Henry Jenkins:
"1. YouTube functions as a meeting place for different subcultures, fan communities, and other forms of participatory culture, enabling the crosspollination of formal practices, themes, and ideas. I see this crosspollination as likely to accelerate the speed with which cultural innovations get picked up and deployed at other social sites.
2. YouTube participants are monitoring mass media and rescuing content that deserves greater attention than it has received -- see here the circulation of Jon Stewart's Crossfire appearance, Stephen Colbert's Washington Press Club talk, or some of Keith Oberman's commentary on the Bush administration and the war, all of which were seen by many more people on YouTube than on television.
3. Grassroots content circulating on YouTube is being pushed upward through a combination of old and new media into greater and greater public visibility -- the movement from blogs to A List blogs (Boing Boing) to major web publications (Salon, Slate) to niche television (Daily Show, Letterman) to mainstream television (The Early Show) to advertising. This is such a powerful illustration of how convergence culture works.
4. YouTube is forcing major media companies to opt in or out of participatory culture -- with companies like MTV Networks enabling certain content to circulate through this channel or several major Japanese media companies deciding to yank their anime-related content off last week." (http://www.henryjenkins.org/2006/11/googtube_tv_20_or_bubble_20.html)
Mark Pesce on the impact of You Tube's hyperdistribution on the mass media
Mark Pesce:
"It's not that YouTube is competing with you for dollars - it isn't, at least not yet - but rather, it is competing for attention. Attention is the limiting factor for the audience; we are cashed up but time-poor. Yet, even as we've become so time-poor, the number of options for how we can spend that time entertaining ourselves has grown so grotesquely large as to be almost unfathomable. This is the real lesson of YouTube, the one I want you to consider in your deliberations today. In just the past three years we have gone from an essential scarcity of filmic media - presented through limited and highly regulated distribution channels - to a hyperabundance of viewing options.
This hyperabundance of choices, it was supposed until recently, would lead to a sort of "decision paralysis," whereby the viewer would be so overwhelmed by the number of choices on offer that they would simply run back, terrified, to the highly regularized offerings of the old-school distribution channels. This has not happened; in fact, the opposite has occured: the audience is fragmenting, breaking up into ever-smaller "microaudiences". It is these microaudiences that YouTube speaks directly to. The language of microaudiences is YouTube's native tongue.
In order to illustrate the transformation that has completely overtaken us, let's consider a hypothetical fifteen year-old boy, home after a day at school. He is multi-tasking: texting his friends, posting messages on Bebo, chatting away on IM, surfing the web, doing a bit of homework, and probably taking in some entertainment. That might be coming from a television, somewhere in the background, or it might be coming from the Web browser right in front of him. (Actually, it's probably both simultaneously.) This teenager has a limited suite of selections available on the telly - even with satellite or cable, there won't be more than a few hundred choices on offer, and he's probably settled for something that, while not incredibly satisfying, is good enough to play in the background.
Meanwhile, on his laptop, he's viewing a whole series of YouTube videos that he's received from his friends; they've found these videos in their own wanderings, and immediately forwarded them along, knowing that he'll enjoy them. He views them, and laughs, he forwards them along to other friends, who will laugh, and forward them along to other friends, and so on. Sharing is an essential quality of all of the media this fifteen year-old has ever known. In his eyes, if it can't be shared, a piece of media loses most of its value. If it can't be forwarded along, it's broken.
For this fifteen year-old, the concept of a broadcast network no longer exists. Television programmes might be watched as they're broadcast over the airwaves, but more likely they're spooled off of a digital video recorder, or downloaded from the torrent and watched where and when he chooses. The broadcast network has been replaced by the social network of his friends, all of whom are constantly sharing the newest, coolest things with one another. The current hot item might be something that was created at great expense for a mass audience, but the relationship between a hot piece of media and its meaningfulness for a microaudience is purely coincidental. All the marketing dollars in the world can foster some brand awareness, but no amount of money will inspire that fifteen year old to forward something along - because his social standing hangs in the balance. If he passes along something lame, he'll lose social standing with his peers. This factors into every decision he makes, from the brand of runners he wears, to the television series he chooses to watch. Because of the hyperabundance of media - something he takes as a given, not as an incredibly recent development - all of his media decisions are weighed against the values and tastes of his social network, rather than against a scarcity of choices." (http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/?p=42)
More Information
(27.07.06) What goes on the Net stays on the Net (About YouTube: "They could refuse to take down your video... ...charge YOU for your own video. ...insert ads in the video..." - www.pbs.org)
Analysis for Flow magazine by John MacMurria at http://jot.communication.utexas.edu/flow/?jot=view&id=1995
Henry Jenkins on YouTube at http://www.henryjenkins.org/2006/11/googtube_tv_20_or_bubble_20.html