Hello! And welcome to a very special edition of Inside The Newsroom where we’ll celebrate the 15th anniversary of YouTube, and go through the ups and downs of the world’s largest video sharing platform with today’s guest Ryan Broderick of BuzzFeed News. Ryan has covered technology for the past decade and has been with BuzzFeed since 2011, and has a charming newsletter called Garbage Day which features all the fun stuff on the internet from the past week. It’s hard to find the words to describe YouTube’s impact on society and how much it’s shaped our lives, but Ryan does so in a way far better than anyone, so please please please listen to the podcast up top. I’ve tried to cover everything in detail below, but there’s just so much I couldn’t include it all. Enjoy 🤓
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Today’s Episode
Today’s episode took more than 12 hours to put together, so please consider liking this post by clicking the little heart at the very top of the page, and also sharing with your friends on social media. I’ll be eternally grateful.
Ryan 👇
April 23, 2005: YouTube Is Born… At San Diego Zoo
Fifteen years ago today, YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim uploaded the very first video to the platform that would go onto shape the world we live in. But don’t get too excited. The 19-second video taken at San Diego Zoo features Karim describing how long elephant trunks are. Yeah, not much of an improvisor, but to be fair to the bloke, he did start YouTube. If you still want to view the first video after that awesome description, have at it…
Karim met fellow co-founders Chad Hurley (no not the guy behind the surfing brand) and Steve Chen at PayPal, where each had significant roles in the design and direction of one of the world’s largest payment platforms. Now more than a billion hours of video content are watched on YouTube every day, and more than 2 billion people use the platform every month. But what most people don’t know is that YouTube was originally a dating site, where users uploaded videos of themselves to try and attract other men and women. Karim, Hurley and Chen even registered the YouTube.com domain on Valentines Day two months before. Like Mark Zuckerberg over at Facebook, or rather Facemash, the three YouTubers realized their new platform had the potential to be so much more.
YouTube’s original homepage 👇😷 | Credit: Web Archive
What are the Founders Doing Now?
Chad Hurley served as YouTube’s first CEO and went onto launch a smartphone video editing company along with Chen called MixBit, similar to other video sharing apps such as Vine (RIP), Snapchat and TikTok. Hurley’s now a part-owner of the Golden State Warriors and the Los Angeles Football Club.
Steve Chen served as YouTube’s CTO and went onto launch MixBit with Hurley, which was eventually sold to BlueJeans in 2018. Chen is currently an entrepreneur in residence at Google Ventures.
Despite uploading the first video, Jawed Karim actually had the smallest role of the three. After the launch, Karim enrolled at Stanford University to obtain a master’s in computer science while also serving as an advisor to YouTube. He went onto co-found a venture fund called Youniversity Ventures (clever) that was one of Airbnb’s first investors.
What Was Video Like Before YouTube?
Good question. The biggest reason YouTube is what is today is because there wasn’t a central hub to seamlessly upload videos in a range of formats in 2005. Of course, videos existed on the internet before YouTube, but it was such a hassle to watch anything. I’m not sure how proud I am to tell you that I had to download the iconic peer-to-peer sharing platforms LimeWire and BitTorrent, whereby users uploaded video files to the internet for the rest of us to download with accute anxiety over whether we were breaking the law or not. From there, I waited two to three minutes for the video to load in Windows Media Player, and voila! I could watch a whole minute of video! I’m sure there were other ways, but this is what I and many others had to do to watch a single video. And I know what you’re thinking, Pornhub came in 2007 (pun intended), so this was the ritual for porn users as well. Oh, you weren’t thinking that… 🐢
November 13, 2006: YouTube Acquired By Google For $1.65 billion
A year and half after Karim uploaded that video at the zoo, YouTube was the world’s fastest growing website and everyone had their eyes on Silicon Valley’s hottest startup. Even with its meteoric rise, nobody could have imagined that Google would buy YouTube for $1.65 billion — $2.1 billion (£1.75 billion) in today’s money. Google’s acquisition is a piece of history in itself and was ridiculed for paying so much. Dallas Mavericks owner and tech entrepreneur Mark Cuban called the move “crazy”, and even Google later acknowledged they probably paid a billion too much. But YouTube now generates $15 billion in annual revenue, and it would take no less than 12 figures for Google to let go of it. Put simply, it might be the greatest tech acquisition of all time.
Google is the very reason why YouTube is so popular and profitable. The search engine giant was already gobbling up the majority of the advertising market, and its AdSense model opened YouTube up to content creators which accelerated its popularity and revenue even further. Google also redesigned YouTube’s clunky interface with its trademark clean and sleek design, making the platform perfect for travelling down multiple rabbit holes to consume even more content. Perhaps only Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram for $1 billion (£629 million) in 2012 can rival as the best tech buys in history.
YouTubers and Their Millions
YouTube wouldn’t be what it is without its thousands of content creators, many of whom use the platform to make a living. The way it works is users must enable AdSense for their YouTube account, which allows clever algorithms to generate adverts on videos automatically. The more views, the more revenue — around $8 per 1,000 views. YouTube then takes 45 percent of that revenue, leaving most creators with the remaining 55, though there are higher rates for creators with the highest views.
The highest-paid Youtuber of 2019 was eight-year-old Ryan Kaji, who started out reviewing toys on camera, and has since matured to conducting science experiments. Last year Kaji earned an estimated $26 million. But don’t be fooled. The entirety of that money didn’t come from YouTube. Kaji has launched a line of more than 100 toys and clothing items, has a show on Nickelodeon, and has deals with Roku and Walmart. He’s part of the growing number of YouTube stars who are becoming less reliant on the platform, with some leaving YouTube altogether. If Google wants to stop the growing trend of its users turning to other platforms to make money, it’ll have no option other than to change its revenue rates.
The Dark Side of YouTube
While YouTube has been a vehicle for thousands of people to make a living and hundreds to become millionaires, there’s been several missteps that have led to the spread of extremism and fake information. Chen, Hurley and Karim could never have imagined that their innocent video sharing platform would be used to disseminate far-right hate and white supremacism, but that’s the reality of what tech entrepreneurs of today must have at the top of their priority list, above aesthetics, above share-ability, and certainly above profitability.
That’s where YouTube has failed the most, to protect society from the vitriol and divisiveness that’s running through our communities’ bloodstreams. YouTube not only has not done enough, it’s among the most pervasive platforms over the past 15 years. Now, you might ask why Google executives have been so inactive in removing fake news and hate speech. You might also catch yourself feeling sympathetic toward them because of the difficulty to find and remove all hateful content. Don’t be. Don’t be fooled by the carefully constructed PR talk telling us that they’re doing everything they can to remove hateful videos that violate their rules. It’s bullshit. YouTube, and several other social media platforms including Facebook and Twitter, know full well that if they were to actually adhere to the very rules they set in place that they would lose half of their users overnight. If amazing journalists like Ryan didn’t write on this issue profusely, Google would happily continue to skip along as if nothing was wrong.
YouTube’s Hits and Misses
So we know that YouTube has completely revolutionized the way we watch video, and how thousands of people can earn a living. But what other industries has it spawned? And what did it miss out on? Let’s start with eSports, the multi-billion dollar industry that has absolutely exploded over the past decade. Now, YouTube didn’t create eSports, but it’s fair to say that without it, the professional gaming industry would look totally different. The story arguably starts in South Korea in the late 1990s with the game StarCraft, a science fiction strategy game that allowed multiple players to compete at the same time. As YouTube became more and more popular toward the late 2000s, millions of people began to watch other people play the likes of Minecraft, World of Warcraft and any other game ending in -craft. Online gaming on YouTube is still incredibly strong, with half of the top 10 earners making their fortune from gaming.
But it hasn’t been all fun and games for YouTube, and it certainly isn’t a company that whatever it touches turns to gold. Perhaps its largest failure to date, both in time and money invested, has been its premium version, YouTube Premium, formerly known as Music Key, also known as YouTube Red. YouTube launched its premium service in 2014 and required users to pay a monthly subscription to listen to music and TV shows. The problem was that Netflix had already cornered the market, switching its own service from Blockbuster-style video rentals to online streaming in 2010. Why would users pay $12 a month on a platform they’d previously got their content for free? Simply put, YouTube was far too late and Google’s executives might never get over the billions of dollars Netflix and its streaming rivals are making today.
Like with Netflix, YouTube also missed the boat on the rise and rise of video social media. While YouTube execs were investing the majority of their resources on their ad model, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram and now TikTok made it seamless for users to upload videos from their mobile phones, where the majority of internet users now consume content. YouTube has also lost its dominance of the ‘influencer market’, an industry Instagram has gladly made inroads into. Which leads us to our final part of our celebration of YouTube: What’s next?
The Next 15…
So here we are, the end of a remarkable journey over the past 15 years. Instead of being sentimental over the fact we’ll never see such an enthusiastic video about the size of elephant trunks uploaded to the internet ever again, let’s look forward to what YouTube should do in the next 15 years. I asked Ryan this very question, and his answer centered on mobile. If YouTube is to continue growing its audience, it must make it easier for its content creators to create content. How does it do that? By creating an entire equivalent version of Adobe Premiere inside its app for free. It must also create a virtual editing platform with advanced editing tools that allow users to create quality content with the few proverbial clicks of a user’s thumbs, similar to how TikTok has taken over the short form video market. And lastly, it must pivot its strategy and have mobile at the very center of it. If it doesn’t work on mobile, it doesn’t work for the user. Cheers to that 🍻
Last week …
#70 — Amy Webb (Future Today Institute) on the lack of government preparation for the coronavirus and the latest 2020 technology trends
… Next week
Nick Rubando on running for the U.S. House of Representatives from Ohio’s 5th district and his upcoming primary on Tuesday April 28
Major Garrett (CBS News) on what it’s like to be in the same room with Donald Trump, and how asking him questions compares to Obama, Bush and Clinton
Related podcasts…
#52 — Katie Notopoulos (BuzzFeed) on the ‘techlash’ and why we can’t trust any of the big technology companies with our privacy
#43 — Kashmir Hill (New York Times) on what she discovered by cutting out Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google and Microsoft from her life for six weeks
#41 — Jessica Lessin (The Information) on starting a technology journalism startup from scratch and how to breakup Facebook
Job Corner
A couple of weeks ago I launched a journalism jobs and internships board. It now has almost 600 active postings, mostly based in the U.S. and the UK, but also a few dozen from other parts of the world. Sign up for weekly updates. New jobs from yesterday include…
Bloomberg — Graphic Designer
Indianapolis Star — Food and Dining Reporter
New York Magazine — Features Writer
The Athletic — Staff Editor
The New York Times (London) — Business Reporter
The Texas Tribune Student Fellowships
The Toronto Star — Freelance Writers Needed
The Wall Street Journal (London) — Editor
University of Stirling — Professor in Digital Journalism
Vox Media — Audio Producer
YouTube — Media Specialist
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#72 — Ryan Broderick (BuzzFeed) on YouTube's 15th Anniversary