YouTube

Online Video and Participatory Culture

Jean Burgess, Joshua Green

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780745660196, 9780745660189
• eBook ISBN: 9781509533596
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Since launching as a website for everyday video-sharing in 2005, YouTube has become one of the world's most powerful digital media platforms. Originally published in 2009 when YouTube was only four years old, this book was the first to systematically investigate its cultural impacts and politics, highlighting the productive tensions between its amateur community rhetoric and its commercial media logics. Since then, YouTube has grown as a platform and matured as a company. Its business model is built on coordinating the interests of and extracting value from its content creators, audiences, advertisers and media partners, in a commercial setting where YouTube now competes with other powerful social media and streaming television platforms. Meanwhile, YouTube's diverse communities of content creators, who developed the platform's most distinctive cultural forms and genres, have strong ideas and interests of their own. While preserving the original edition's forensic analysis of YouTube's early popular culture and uses, this fully revised and updated edition weaves fresh examples, updated theoretical perspectives and comparative historical insights throughout each of its six chapters. Burgess and Green show how, over its more than a decade of existence, YouTube's dual logics of commerciality and community have persisted, generating new genres of popular culture, new professional identities and business models for the media industries, and giving rise to ongoing platform governance challenges. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in the contemporary and future implications of digital media platforms and will be particularly valuable for students and scholars in media, communication and cultural studies.

CHAPTER ONE
How YouTube Matters

This chapter introduces YouTube as an important but complex object of study. It shows how the story of the platform is tied to the story of the changing digital media environment, and to much older debates about the role of media and popular culture in society. The first section discusses YouTube’s emergence in the mid 2000s, its subsequent ascendancy to a dominant position in the media environment, and some of the competing public narratives about the reasons for its success. The following section, ‘The Platform Business’, discusses the changing nature of the media business as it has converged with digital technologies and the Internet, and highlights YouTube’s role in those changes. We then describe some of the challenges inherent in studying digital media platforms, and the changing state of the art in YouTube research methods. In the final section, we briefly sketch out some of the scholarly debates about the cultural value of YouTube and its role as a site of ‘participatory culture’, showing that these debates extend much further back in history than YouTube’s period of existence, and that they have relevance well beyond YouTube itself. These are important debates about the importance and value of popular culture, the politics of commercial media, and the significance of ordinary people’s access to active and creative participation in culture. YouTube has been a continuous focus of these longstanding debates even as it has evolved along with the changing digital media environment – and that, we argue, is how YouTube matters.

Origins

Founded by former PayPal employees Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, YouTube’s website was officially launched with little public fanfare in June 2005. Its original purpose was, on the surface, a technological rather than a cultural one: YouTube was one of a number of services aiming to remove the technical barriers faced by non-expert users who wanted to share video on the web. The website provided a very simple, integrated interface that enabled people to upload, publish, and view streaming videos without much technical knowledge, using standard web browsers and modest Internet speeds. YouTube set no limits on the number of videos users could upload, offered basic social functions like the opportunity to connect with other users as ‘friends’, and provided links and HTML code that enabled videos to be easily embedded into other websites. These social networking and sharing features capitalised on and were designed to add value to the recent introduction of popularly accessible blogging platforms like Blogger and Wordpress. Many of these blogging technologies already featured the ability to embed images from popular photosharing platforms like Flickr, a leading ‘Web 2.0’ service that combined content creation, curation, and social networking. In fact, in 2005, technology business website TechCrunch named YouTube as the leading contender to be the ‘The Flickr of Video’ (Arrington, 2005). This vision of YouTube as a ‘Web 2.0’ service for videosharing is a long way from the mainstream media platform that YouTube had become by 2017, with its complex relationship to broadcast and cable television and the music business, and with home-grown YouTube stars boasting billions of subscribers.

It would be a mistake to believe that the transformation of YouTube from social networking site to major media platform was master-planned by Hurley, Chen, and Karim, but we do have some information about their thinking in those early days. Fortunately for journalists, researchers, and students of YouTube, the copyright-related court case fought between Google and Viacom resulted in the public release of large numbers of emails sent between the YouTube founders in the early years.¹ As this in-house correspondence shows, while the founders always saw YouTube as a commercial enterprise, they were quite agnostic about the content side of the business – the social networking side came first. That is, mirroring the logics of Web 2.0 at the time, the original vision appeared to be that video content shot on mobile phones would be a catalyst to online connections, perhaps even involving dating, which in turn would increase the size of the YouTube userbase and could generate advertising or subscription revenue. On the distant horizon were more speculative, aspirational ideas about charging their users subscription fees for the ability to watch ‘premium’ media content. Pitching for investment at Sequoia Capital in 2005,² the founders hinted that amateur content created and contributed by ordinary, socially networked users might eventually sit alongside legitimately uploaded, professionally produced media content; meanwhile, the emails simultaneously reveal some nervousness about copyright violating user-uploaded content. But overall, within certain limits (particularly with respect to violent and sexually explicit content), in practice YouTube really didn’t mind what kind of content their users were uploading, as long as the scale of the platform’s user population and their activity levels continued to grow. This relative openness, both in terms of what content was uploaded to the platform, and who got to upload it, was embedded in the company aim, which was included in the presentation slides (‘pitch deck’) and press release accompanying their (ultimately successful) pitch to Sequoia Capital:

To become the primary outlet of user-generated content on the Internet, and to allow anyone to upload, share, and browse this content.

In a later slide from the pitch deck, the founders emphasised the platform’s key affordances, which combined its fundamental technical features (making it easier for ordinary users to upload, transcode, and share video online) with a community-formation function:

• Consumers upload their videos to YouTube. YouTube takes care of serving the content to millions of viewers.
• YouTube’s video encoding back-end converts uploaded videos to Flash Video.
• YouTube provides a community that connects users to videos, users to users, and videos to videos.

This aspect of the pitch aligns early YouTube with the tech industry and ‘Web 2.0’, because it emphasises usable functionality, technical features, and content as a means of social connection.

But from the beginning, YouTube was actively engaged in a convergence between tech industry and media industries ways of thinking and operating. The Sales and Distribution plan presented in the Sequoia pitch shows that the company sought to combine advertising revenue generated from user activity and/or fees for premium features (a social networking site business model) with subscription or hosting fees for premium content (a media business model):

• Advertising
• Act as a for-pay distribution channel for promotional videos
• Charge members for premium features
• Charge viewers for premium content

Here too, albeit in an early form, we can see the uneasy convergence between the dual logics of community and commerce; and broadcast and social media – logics that still persisted, competed, and conflicted in the YouTube of 2017.

YouTube has come a long way since 2005. In October 2006, Google acquired the business for $1.65 billion.³ By November 2007 it was already the most popular entertainment website in Britain, with the BBC website in second place,⁴ and in early 2008 it was, according to various web metrics services, consistently in the top ten most-visited websites globally. In 2017 it was ranked second behind only Google worldwide, with more than 85 per cent of visitors coming from outside the United States.⁵ When we completed the first edition of this manuscript in April 2008, YouTube hosted upwards of 85 million videos, a number that represented a tenfold increase over the previous year (and one that seemed jawdroppingly huge at the time).⁶ The growth in both content and user-base has continued at such a rate that the company has had to find new ways to measure and communicate its scale – merely counting videos soon became inadequate to convey the platform’s growing market power. By 2013, YouTube was reporting that more than 100 hours of video were uploaded each minute;⁷ and in 2017 the company website claimed that their billion users were watching a billion hours of content each day.⁸ In 2008, Internet market research company comScore reported that the service accounted for 37 per cent of all Internet videos watched inside the United States, with the next largest service, Fox Interactive Media, accounting for only 4.2 per cent.⁹ By 2017, even given the proliferation of competing video apps and streaming services like Netflix, YouTube reportedly accounted for 80 per cent of the total 12 billion hours spent using the top 10 video streaming apps on the Android mobile platform in the twelve months to July 2017 (Perez, 2017). According to a music industry report, YouTube even accounted for 46 per cent of all online music streaming time in 2017, including non-video platforms like Pandora and Spotify (McIntyre, 2017). As a media platform whose early, dramatic growth was substantially driven by user-created and user-curated content, YouTube’s sheer size and mainstream popularity remain unprecedented.

Since the original features of the YouTube platform were very similar to other online video start-ups, various commentators have sought to explain how it so rapidly overtook the competition in that first year. As told by Jawed Karim, the third co-founder who left the business to return to college in November 2005, the success of the site is due to the implementation of four key features: video recommendations via the ‘related videos’ list; an email link to enable video sharing; comments (and other social networking functionality); and an embeddable video player (Gannes, 2006). These features were implemented as part of a redesign after the failure of previous attempts to popularise the website; attempts that included offering $100 to attractive girls who posted ten or more videos. According to Karim, the founders reportedly didn’t receive a single reply to this offer, which they posted on Craigslist (Gannes, 2006).¹⁰

An alternative story about the tipping point in YouTube’s journey to early success is a cultural rather than a technological one. It relates to a satirical sketch from Saturday Night Live featuring two nerdy, stereotypical New Yorkers rapping about buying cupcakes and going to see the Chronicles of Narnia. In December 2005 this clip – entitled ‘Lazy Sunday’ – became something of a break-out YouTube hit. The two-and-a-half-minute sketch was viewed 1.2 million times in its first ten days online and had been seen more than five million times by February 2006, when NBC Universal demanded YouTube remove it, along with 500 other clips, or face legal action under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (Biggs, 2006). The rise and fall of ‘Lazy Sunday’ brought YouTube to the notice of the mainstream press – and as something other than a technological development. For the New York Times (Biggs, 2006), ‘Lazy Sunday’ demonstrated the potential of YouTube as an outlet for established media to reach out to the elusive but much-desired youth audience. As much as it was imagined to be a viral marketing wonderland, however, the site was reported as a looming threat to the established logics of the broadcast media landscape (Kerwin, 2006; Wallenstein, 2006a). Although early reporting in the features, technology, and business pages discussed YouTube and video sharing as the Internet’s next ‘new thing’ (Byrne, 2005; Graham, 2005; Kirsner, 2005; Nussenbaum, Ryan, and Lewis, 2005; Rowan, 2005), it was through this ‘big media’-related event that YouTube became a regular subject for the mainstream media.

Quite apart from which one of these origin myths turned out to be right, it is significant that each of them evokes a different idea of what early YouTube was: was it another online fad, beloved by the tech crowd, that ordinary people needed to be convinced to use? Or a new kind of media distribution and talent discovery platform, sort of like television, but on the web? Either way, YouTube’s early ascendancy occurred amid a fog of public uncertainty and contradiction around what it was actually for. In August 2005, only a few months into the life of the service, the ‘About Us’ page offered only the most tentative and vague hints at the possible uses of YouTube:

Show off your favorite videos to the world

Take videos of your dogs, cats, and other pets

Blog the videos you take with your digital camera or cell phone

Securely and privately show videos to your friends and family around the world

… and much, much more!

In these early days, the website carried the by-line ‘Your Digital Video Repository’, which conflicts somewhat with the now-notorious exhortation to ‘Broadcast Yourself’ – a catchphrase that has passed into vernacular use, but which hasn’t been a prominent part of YouTube’s brand identity since it was dropped from the logo in 2010. This shift from the idea of the website as a personal storage facility for video content to a platform for public self-expression opened it up to the more revolutionary rhetoric about user-led content creation and innovation that led to Time making the person of the year ‘You’ in 2006 (Grossman, 2006b). Since then, YouTube’s apparent or stated mission has continuously evolved as a result of the similarly changing relationships and tensions among competing corporate logics, changing platform affordances, and diverse user practices.

Despite this hype around a user-generated content revolution, and the company’s insistence that the service was designed for sharing personal videos among existing social networks, it wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Preface to the Second Edition
• Acknowledgements
• 1 How YouTube Matters
• 2 YouTube and the Media
• 3 YouTube’s Popular Culture
• 4 The YouTube Community
• 5 YouTube’s Cultural Politics
• 6 YouTube’s Competing Futures
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement