Our world on autoplay: K Narayanan writes on 20 years of YouTube
It started out as a dating website, faltered, then soared. Google has since turned it into a juggernaut. What’s next for the world’s biggest streaming platform?
All stories begin somewhere. Finding out where isn’t always easy, and this is especially true of YouTube.
The facts are straightforward. The video-sharing platform, now believed to be the second-most-visited site in the world (after Google), was incorporated in 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim.
One could say the story began three years earlier, when eBay took over PayPal, causing a culture clash that led 38 of the original 50 PayPal employees to quit. Among these were PayPal co-founders Elon Musk and Peter Thiel; future venture capitalists David O Sacks and Roelof Botha; and the three future founders of YouTube.
One could also go further back, to 1995 and the launch of Match.com, one of the earliest dating platforms on the internet.
The use of computers in matchmaking is older than the internet, going all the way back to a 1959 Stanford project that used an IBM 650 to connect 49 men with an equal number of women. But for Gary Kremen, the founder of Match, it wasn’t as easy. He wanted to use data to help people connect. He wanted to be able to feed in hobbies, professions, height, weight; anything that could influence affinity. But there was a problem.
In 1995, the internet was overwhelmingly male. Without significant female participation, Kremen knew Match was doomed to failure.
The story of Match.com may seem tangential to the story of YouTube, but when Chen, Hurley and Karim started their company, they visualised it as an online dating platform where men and women would post videos about themselves that prospective partners could watch. They even had a slogan: Tune In, Hook Up.
Ten years after the launch of Match, the internet had changed a great deal. But it was still male-dominated, and online dating was viewed with suspicion. The new company just couldn’t get women to post videos of themselves. Chen, Karim and Hurley even posted on Craigslist, offering women $20 to post videos of themselves on the platform. There were still no takers.
So they performed arguably the most effective pivot in internet history, and opened up the platform to any sort of video.
***
The pivot was informed by one of the most significant sports events of the Aughts: the 2004 Superbowl halftime show, featuring Kid Rock, P Diddy, Nelly and, most famously, Janet Jackson and Justin Timberlake. Towards the end of the performance, Timberlake ripped off a portion of Jackson’s top, exposing her breast.
The resulting scandal nearly destroyed Jackson’s career. Despite being broadcast live on TV, clips of the incident were next to impossible to find online a year later, giving Chen and the others the idea of a broad-based video-hosting platform.
Karim was the first to post on YouTube, that now-tiresomely-famous 19-second video of him standing in front of the elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo. The video, still on the platform, now has over 360 million views — a significant number, but one that pales, for instance, in comparison to Baby Shark (2016), which has over 15 billion.
By the end of 2005, YouTube was a genuine phenomenon. TV channels advertised on it. Charlie bit his brother’s finger. The music video Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny ended with gentle children’s TV host Fred Rogers standing triumphant over a heap of dead heroes from Batman to Optimus Prime, in a bloodstained sweater.
And there were other videos: brutal clips from the war raging in Iraq, videos of war crimes committed by American soldiers at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
Disturbingly, for the corporate world, movies, music videos and TV show episodes began to show up in their entirety. Corporate lawyers rubbed their hands in glee and, by the end of 2006, the platform was facing a deluge of copyright-violation suits.
***
Also in 2005, just a month before YouTube was incorporated, Google launched its video platform, Google Video. It was, in many ways, the opposite of YouTube. Videos were manually verified before being made available on the site, an approval process that sometimes took weeks. The focus was on broadcasters, with the platform pitched as a place where people could watch old network TV shows. By mid-2005, YouTube had left Google Video in the dust.
In November 2006, Google executive Jeff Huber emailed Peter Chane, the Google Video product manager, saying YouTube was “cranking interesting features a lot faster than we are, but don’t likely have a backend that will scale or plan to make money”. Chane responded that Google Video had plans to catch up, and that YouTube was angling to be acquired by Yahoo. The thread went on, until Google co-founder Larry Page stepped in with a single sentence: “I think we should look into acquiring them.”
A year later, the acquisition was complete. YouTube had been looking for a buyer. There had been informal conversations with companies such as Microsoft, Yahoo and Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Google moved faster.
Their biggest concern were the copyright-violation suits, and the promise of more to come, but Google was confident they could work this out. The price they paid was a jaw-dropping $1.65 billion in stock — an unheard-of sum for a company with no revenue model yet.
Pundits muttered about risk, but two decades on, the YouTube acquisition has paid off many times over. And when it came to the legal hassles, they did figure it out.
2007 saw the launch of Content ID, an automated system that checks posts for copyright violations. It also saw the launch of the YouTube Partner Program, in which content creators could monetise their videos by allowing the insertion of ads, building on synergies with Google’s own AdSense system.
Today, this programme is the cornerstone of the “creator economy” and has helped make YouTube one of the most successful monetisation systems on the internet.
***
Just four years after they bought it, in 2010, Google announced that YouTube had registered a profit.
It was doing a lot more than that.
It had started to spawn its own superstars: PewDiePie (the Swede Felix Kjellberg, who started out making gaming videos and has since built a side hustle in online feuds), Pomplamoose (the husband-wife musical duo of Nataly Dawn and Jack Conte), Michelle Phan (the future beauty influencer), Jenna Marbles (a comedian and the first woman to hit a billion views).
In 2012, Korean popstar Psy’s Gangnam Style became the first video to hit a billion views, and K-pop began to travel the world. The video was so popular that it broke YouTube’s view counter, which at the time maxed out at 2.147 billion views.
The next few years saw a range of new product launches: YouTube Kids, for children’s content; YouTube Gaming, to compete with Twitch; YouTube Red, which would become YouTube Premium, offering ad-free content.
When Covid-19 struck, it had a major impact on YouTube, driving massive surges in viewership, content creation and revenue. Amid rolling lockdowns around the world, people turned to the platform for entertainment, education, new, fitness videos and recipe videos, leading to record-setting usage across the platform.
Ad revenue nearly doubled, rising from over $15 billion in 2019 to $28.8 billion in 2021.
***
There are competitors, of course. TikTok and Instagram Reels focus on short videos and encourage endless scrolling more directly. Twitch targets gamers effectively. Streaming platforms such as Netflix and Amazon Prime are competing for the viewer’s time and attention. But YouTube rolls on, regardless.
It hasn’t all been smooth sailing. Small creators have felt unfairly penalised by the algorithm, which tends to promote videos with 10,000 or more views. There was Elsagate, in which bizarre and brutal cartoon videos gamed the YouTube Kids algorithm to garner millions of views, at least some of them from children on devices set to autoplay.
The platform has also been accused of being a hotbed of political misinformation and disinformation.
As for the future, like everything tech these days, it seems likely that AI will be involved. (Maybe the next product will generate videos based on text prompts.) There is also the anti-trust litigation facing Google, and a divestiture of YouTube is a possibility here.
Google Search and Google Ads could be split up, which could disrupt the creator economy at the heart of the video platform.
At the moment, it remains the platform that binds the world. Whether it’s a security guard on the night shift watching a movie, a traveller on a train watching a talk show, a pensioner watching a devotional song, a child watching a cartoon or a student at a virtual lecture, this is where most of the world hits play.
(K Narayanan writes on films, videogames, books and occasionally technology)
One Subscription.
Get 360° coverage—from daily headlines
to 100 year archives.
HT App & Website
