The YouTube Story Part Two

up as far as two thousand seven. It really didn't take long for me to get through a full episodes worth of material, although to be fair, I did backtrack a bit to talk about the early days over at PayPal, because the founders of YouTube started at PayPal. But those first two years of YouTube, we're incredibly important. Around that same time YouTube emerged from beta, there were dozens of other sites that were trying to become the home for

web streaming video. But YouTube's conversion tools made it really easy to upload files, meaning that the site can handle several different file formats, and it took all the work of converting those into the format that YouTube was using to display them on the web all on its own, so users didn't have to worry about having their video forms files in a specific format. YouTube could accept just about anything, or at least several of the major ones

in that time. So YouTube became a big player in the space, ultimately becoming big enough for Google to swoop in and buy the company for the princely some of one point six five billion dollars. Well by two thousand seven, Google owned the company and fun tidbit. The deal to purchase YouTube was apparently done in the parking lot of a Denny's. That's according to Gideon You, who had worked at Yahoo before moving over to become YouTube's first chief

financial officer. Yeahoo had also been one of the early suitors for YouTube, so imagine how different things would have been if that deal had gone through. Now, one of YouTube's three founders, Joe Ed Kareem, had left the company by the time Google was acquiring it, the remaining to Steve Chen and Chad Hurley stayed on with YouTube. In fact, Chad Hurley was the CEO of the company and remained so until Steve Chen was YouTube's chief technology officer, and

both founders would stay with YouTube till now. One thing I left out of the last episode was that time Magazine had used YouTube's user interface design in its Person of the Year issue. Now you might remember this. That was the year when you were named Person of the Year and and no, not not you specifically, but the you in the general sense. I think what the magazine was getting at was that user generated content was becoming

a powerful force in the online world. Suddenly you had platforms like YouTube that were able to give average people the opportunity to make their voices heard to the war at large, and it suddenly seemed possible for a young storyteller to bypass the traditional pitfall filled path of finding

success with a direct conduit to an audience. Of course, this was also in a time before hundreds of hours of content joined YouTube's platform every single minute, which made it increasingly difficult for any one piece of content to be discovered on the platform. But we'll talk about that more later. In March two thousand seven, YouTube announced it would honor the best user created videos on its site with a special awards ceremony, and they launched the YouTube

Video Awards, with nominees curated by YouTube itself. Users had the opportunity to vote on their favorites, but they couldn't just nominate anything. They could only vote on the ones that the company nominated. Categories included most Creative, most Inspirational, Best Series, Best Comedy, Musician of the Year, Best Commentary, and Most Adorable Video Ever. Winners of those first awards included Aska Ninja for Best Series and Okay Goes Video for Here It Goes Again for most creative That's the

video with all the treadmills. YouTube would hold a similar awards event the following year, and then it just sort of quietly vanished after two thousand eight. YouTube would later launch an award show specifically for music videos, and they held that event in but mostly the company sat back and let numerous other organizations step in to take over the awards game. See also the Webbies, the stream E's, the Online Video Awards, and more. YouTube helped legitimize user

created content, and they turned it into an industry. Not everything was worth putting money behind, but there were more than a few creators who stuck struck a chord with their respective audiences, and they got tons of views as a result and actually began to make a living once YouTube allowed them to monetize those videos. Because in the early days, just because you had a video that was getting lots of traction didn't mean you were making any money.

You couldn't serve up and add against it for a while until until YouTube started to create the partners program. Early on, YouTube was working with larger outlets like established media outlets, and gradually they began to also partner with individuals and made two thousand seven, something truly historic happened. Prankster's on four Chan, which some have described as the

Internet equivalent of moss Eisley. In other words, it's a hive of scum and villainy, began a meme that occasionally still pops up today, more than a decade later, although it's not as frequent as it was and it's heyday. That meme was to drop a link to a specific YouTube video, but you would claim it was showing something that would get a lot of point folks to to click on the video. You you would make up something. Maybe you would say it was supposed to be the

trailer to an anticipated video game. So, for example, in the early days, one of the claims was, oh, this link will take you to a trailer for Grand Theft Auto four, Or you might say that it was a video of a famous person in a compromising situation, but what the link actually sent you to was someone who was there to let you know he's never gonna give you up. He's never gonna let you down, He's never

going to run around and hurt you. Yep. Made two thousand seven, just two years after YouTube had even entered into beta, we got the first rick roll. That's how old that joke is. YouTube branched out beyond the United States. In two thousand seven, the company launched its service in nine countries, including the United Kingdom, and the company also formed a partnership with E M I, which used to be a thing. In fact, it used to be a

really big thing. E M I was a conglomerate, so it's a group of various record labels and collectively it was the fourth largest record company in the world. E M I was a powerful traditional media company back in two thousand seven, and just a few years later it would find itself billions of dollars in debt, and ultimately it was sold off in various chunks to other companies like City Group, Vivendi's Universal Music Group, and as well

as a business owned by Sony and a TV. But in two thousand seven, this was a really big partnership. In July two thousand seven, YouTube gained even more mainstream attention when it partnered with CNN to host a presidential debate. Citizens in the United States were invited to submit video questions for the debate, and the July debate was for nominees in the US Democratic Party, so it was the

Democratic hopefuls for the candidacy of president. The Republican presidential debate also aired on YouTube, but that happened later in November. The following year, two thousand eight, seven of the sixteen presidential hopefuls had created videos for YouTube announcing their campaigns, so it was the beginning of the politically savvy recognizing YouTube as a way of reaching out to their potential constituents. According to The Telegraph, YouTube began receiving ten hours worth

of video every minute. Today that number is more like four hundred hours uploaded every minute. It's literally impossible to watch everything on YouTube because by the time you finished watching even a short video, hundreds or even thousands of other videos have joined the platform. Now, I mostly say this to get it out of the way, since otherwise this episode and the next one would have every other fact be a boost in the number of hours uploaded

every minute. I'd say, well, by now it was forty hours every minute or eighty hours every minute, and that just gets tedious. I'll in some episodes with some other interesting statistics about YouTube usage, but for now, let's get back to the history of the company. Before are we say goodbye to two thousand seven. I thought it might be fun to mention some of the videos that got the most traction that year, and I'll do this for

the following years as well. At the tail end of the year, the first episode of Drunk History went up on YouTube, and if you're not familiar with the concept, inebriated people, typically comedians, tried to relate some moment of historical significance to the host of the show, and their stories are inner cut with re enactments of that historical event, with characters lips sinking to the voiceover to comedic effect.

It's actually a pretty funny series. One infamous video that went up that year was the Leave Brittany Alone video clip, in which Chris Crocker tearfully admonished the press for hounding his beloved Brittney Spears. Numerous parodies of his video would follow. Will Ferrell got a lot of views with a sketch that went up on YouTube the Landlord Sketch, in which he faced off against a very young, very tiny landlord

who took no crap. This was also the year that Andrew Meyer gave us the phrase don't taze me bro oh. And in two thousand seven, we also learned about a particular type of precipitation a k a. Chocolate rain thanks to Mr tezon Day. The video from that year which has received the most views over time is I'm a Gummy Bear, which I had never heard of before, and yet it is the most viewed video from two thousand seven over time, not necessarily just within that year. It's

a novelty song. Uh. It's received more than one billion views at this point, although it took a long time for it to accrue that many. Oh. Also in two thousand seven, before I finish, one other thing happened, a baby named Charlie bit a kid's finger. In two thousand eight, YouTube formed partnerships with big media companies like CBS, MGM, and lions Gate in an effort to become more of

a competitor in branded entertainment. YouTube was trying to compete against a rising star in branded media online called Hulu. Later on it would be Hulu and Netflix, and then later still Hulu, Netflix and Amazon Video. The agreement allowed these various studios to upload full length films or television

shows onto YouTube. They could serve the videos up alongside advertisements, and the videos appeared in a category called shows that would appear on the homepage, so you could just click on the show's tab and see the things that were up for offer. This feature was originally only available in the United States. And when I say it was served up against ads, a lot of those were static ads

that were actually on the page on YouTube. They weren't video ads incorporated into the video the way they are today. And this was really an attempt for YouTube to make more revenue from its service. The company had found it challenging to serve up ads against short videos, and it found fuel to renatives to generating revenue. In fact, according to many sources, the cost of bandwidth and storing all those videos in the first place was much more than

the revenue generated by the company. It was a money losing proposition. Some people even say that some of that was hidden from Google during the acquisition process in order to try and sweeten the deal as much as possible, although I've not seen anything to really back up those claims with facts. Also in two thousand eight, YouTube was awarded a Peabody Now the Peabody Awards, named after philanthropist George Peabody, are meant to honor powerful and enlightening stories

in media like television and radio. YouTube received a Peabody in two thousand eight because the site's design allowed users around the world to upload video directly to the platform bypassing other hurdles, and thus the Peabody Awards said that YouTube was promoting democracy by giving voices to the voiceless. Over the summer of two thousand eight, hardware manufacturers began

to incorporate YouTube directly into their products. The Sony Bravia television set released in June two thousand eight, had a YouTube feature incorporated into it, giving Bravia owners the option to watch YouTube videos directly on their television sets. In July, Tvo followed suit and built YouTube functionality into its digital video recorders. In December two thousand eight, YouTube launched a

new landing page for high definition video. The company had been rolling out HD video capabilities over the course of about a month, and went live with this new landing page in mid December. This change also meant that the video players appearance was a little different. It was now in widescreen format. Of course, streaming video and HD means sending more data over the Internet, which also means more expensive bandwidth bills. The earliest implementation saw HD at seven

twenty resolution. Later on the following year, in two thousand nine, YouTube would bump that up to ten a DP resolution. So which videos were people watching in two thousand and eight,

While there was Star Wars? According to a three year old, that was a popular video in which an unspeakably adorable little girl attempted to explain what Star Wars is all about and pretty much gets it right as far as I'm concerned, people started watching a video channel featuring a character called Fred Figglehorn, a high pitched, manic, little child

character played by not a little child person. His frantic video struck a chord, and in the following year his channel would become the first to hit one million subscribers on YouTube. I didn't really get the appeal because I found it a little too manic and high pitched and crazy, and I'm old. A video in which two people froze in place at New York City's Grand Central Station, got a ton of views, and it also helped push the concept of flash mobs into the public consciousness, So you

have that to blame partially. Thankfully, we've mostly moved on from that idea at this point, and those were the big ones for two thousand and eight. Now I've got a lot more to say about these middle years of YouTube, but before I jump into the next section, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. In early two thousand nine, US President Barack Obama launched a YouTube channel.

A few weeks later, the Pope launched one. YouTube was quickly becoming an outlet for leaders, celebrities, and others to speak to a potentially large global audience, and it was a way to become related relatable to the average person, or at least the average person who was using YouTube. In April two thousand nine, YouTube signed an agreement with

Vivendi to create a music videos service called Vivo. Vivo would distribute official music videos on YouTube in an effort to sidestep the piracy issues companies had encountered over the last few years. So you can actually watch official music videos in instead of seeing someone who had shot a video off of their television or otherwise pirated the content and uploaded it under their own channel, and it gave

people an authorized source for that kind of content. According to Fast Company, YouTube was serving up more than one billion video views per day by October two thousand nine, but also according to various sources, at this point, YouTube

still had yet to turn a profit. Fast Company sites analysts who estimated YouTube and earned about two hundred forty million dollars from ad revenue in two thousand nine, which is a healthy chunk of change, no doubt about it, But those same analysts said that YouTube's expenses in storing and streaming that video were probably closer to seven hundred million dollars, So spending seven hundred million to make two hundred forty million yikes. But don't worry, there's always money

in the banana stand. Also in October two nine, the British broadcast channel Channel four not part of the BBC, but Channel four, signed a deal with YouTube that had the streaming service offering up full length episodes of Channel four shows shortly after they aired on television. The deal involved an undisclosed ad revenue sharing deal. And was set

to last for three years. YouTube said it was the first deal that saw a broadcaster engage in a comprehensive catch up TV strategy on the platform, and the first episodes found their way onto YouTube in early so catch up TV. The concept is that you can see the episodes that you would have missed otherwise, maybe you were out of the house, you didn't have a DVR. It's a pretty simple concept, but it was a big deal

for this to happen back in two thousand nine. It actually set the stage for that happening on a grander scale later on. Also included shows like Peep Show, which stars Mitchell and Webb, two of my favorite comedians from England. All right, so, some of the videos they got a lot of us in two thousand nine included Okay goes here, Here he goes again. Treadmill video. That one got a lot of us in two thousand nine, even though it previously had had a debuted, but it was one that

really struck a chord. It was one of those that kind of it was almost like a sleeper video that took off a while after it had hit YouTube, and it really set a bar for the band that they have surpassed a few times. Since then, they've become known for their very creative and sometimes heads scratching, lee complicated music videos. Another popular one from two thousand nine was

Susan Boyle on Britain's Got Talent. You might remember her singing a song from Laby Zarabla that brought the house down. We also got to enjoy the effects of anesthetic on a young kid in the video David after dentist. That kid by this point as a teenager, and I wonder if he still gets plagued by people saying how many fingers do you have? They Avid? Another popular video featured a couple named Jill and Kevin, and they danced down the wedding aisle with their entire wedding party in a

choreographed number. They ended up inspiring tons of other videos and an episode of the Office. So, I mean, who can ask for more? You get married and do the way you take the aisle ends up becoming a plot point for a hit sitcom. That's pretty impressive, So let's move on up to two thousand ten. In January of that year, YouTube first began to offer up movies for rent on its service. This put it into more direct

competition with services like Netflix, Hulu, and iTunes. YouTube began with movies that were getting buzz at the Sundance Film Festival, opening up the chance for people to see movies that they might not otherwise get a chance to see if they didn't get a wide theatrical release. The service would gradually grow to include more mainstream films, and in fact, you can still do this today. You can rent films on YouTube, although I find that a lot of people

aren't aware of that. They just didn't even realize that that was a service that was available on YouTube. YouTube implemented a site redesign in March, the first of several. Really their goal was to try and keep visitors on the YouTube platform longer, because if you stay longer, you watch more videos. Watching more videos meant generating more AD revenue. The redesign removed some clutter from the homepage, reducing the

number of links visible on the screen by half. There were new playlist tools that were designed to help users binge videos and hop around more easily, so they'd have fewer reasons to just bounce after watching a video, and YouTube also simplified the way you would rank videos so you might not remember this, but back in the old days at YouTube, you can actually give a video a rank between one and five stars. But starting with that red design, that was reduced to a simple like or dislike,

thumbs up or thumbs down. And YouTube's response, you know why did they do this? They said that the vast majority of ranks on YouTube videos were either five stars or one star. People either said this is the best thing that's ever been uploaded to the Internet, or this is a garbage fire of the video clip and no one should ever watch it. There were very few in between, and so Google said, well, everyone saying it's either five or one, let's just do thumbs up or thumbs down.

Make this simple. So that's what they did. That same year saw Dan Savage launch a campaign to help teens in the l g t b Q community deal with anxiety and depression, offering up advice and counsel for those being bullied because of who they are. That was called the It Gets Better campaign and marked one of the more visible and shared online campaigns up to that point. YouTube would also play a part in a larger online

phenomenon tied to a real world conflict. This was the Arab Spring, which technically began at the very end of Most of the events of the Arab Spring would take place throughout two thousand eleven uh from to two thousand twelve. These events were unfolding, with most of them again being in twenty eleven, but there were various protests and demonstrations in Arabic nations in the Middle East and North Africa

that we're all part of this Arab Spring. It began in Tunisia and spread from there as people throughout the region began to resist what they saw as oppressive regimes. Online platforms like YouTube served as an outlet for people in those countries to tell their stories to the larger world. Others included Twitter and Facebook, which were really instrumental for that purpose. An event that shook things up at YouTube

was Chad Hurley stepping down as CEO. The co founder of the site had been in a leadership position since before the Google acquisition. Hurley moved to a more supporting advisory role and Solar Commander stepped in to become the new CEO of the company. Now, Commander came from Google. In fact, he was employee number nine over at Google.

He had graduated from Stanford university, and he had a degree in biological sciences, which I admit is not exactly the field i'd expect for a tech company executive to possess. I'm not exactly sure. I'd love to hear more about his story to find out how he was pulled into Google and what his contributions were. I mean, I assume he also had a lot of education in other sciences to make him a very valuable addition to Google's team,

especially to become employee number nine. The biological sciences doesn't really jump to mind when I think of Google the search engine. He would remain CEO of YouTube for a few years. He would step down to take more of a senior vice president role with YouTube and Google in two thousand fourteen, but we'll talk more about that in our next episode. Hurley co founded a clothing company called Halasca, but stuck with YouTube for a while. Longer, and by a while, I mean less than a year, and I'll

get to that in just a second. Toward the end of twenty ten, YouTube began to lift a restriction that had been in place for several years, and that restriction was a time limit on video clips. You may not remember this but originally users were limited to uploading clips

there were ten minutes long or shorter. In July, YouTube bump that up to fifteen minutes, but by the end of twenty ten, the company announced that, starting with a selection of users, those time limits would be phased out gradually. It became clear that if you were a user in good standing, if you had not had a history of uploading copyrighted material to YouTube, that you would have those restrictions lifted and you would be able to post videos

of any length to YouTube. I remember, back in the original days, you were seeing this because YouTube wanted to prevent people from uploading entire television series or movies to the service. They wanted to limit the length of video

clips specifically to protect copyrighted material. And you may have encountered older videos that slipped under that intellectual property radar, in which a show or a film was cut up into ten minute chunks, so you'd see something like Back to the Future, Part one of ten, Part two of ten, etcetera, etcetera.

It's not an ideal viewing experience. By the end of twenty ten, YouTube's algorithms were getting pretty good at detecting pirated material and content creators had a larger array of tools at their disposal to remove or essentially create uh disincentives for unauthorized copies of their work. I could probably do a full episode about that content I D system on YouTube and how it works, but I'm gonna give

you a quick overview here to kind of explain it. First, content creators would provide Google or YouTube really with files of the content they wanted to search against on the platform. So let's make this simple with an example. Let's say it's a music label searching for instances of people uploading the latest song from a band like The Struts. So you've got this song from the Struts. You want to make sure that there are no unauthorized instances of that

song up on YouTube. You provide the file to YouTube and say I want to search your database against all videos and see if there are any hits. The file that you give YouTube is called a reference file. Google puts all the reference files into a massive database filled with other reference files. Those files might be full length

pieces of content or snippets of longer pieces. And when ever a user uploads a new file to YouTube, part of that uploading process involves comparing that content against the database of reference files. So Google looks for matches between audio and video elements in the uploaded pieces with anything in the reference database. They have these algorithms that look for matches between audio files in the reference section and what you've just uploaded, or even just elements of video

that are common between the two. It's pretty phenomenal when you think of it as machine recognition of content. It also looks for partial matches clips that could represent a hit but are not a one to one match and might require further UH investigation to make sure that in fact, does represent a violation of copyright. So what happens then?

What happens when Google finds a match between a user uploaded file and something that's in the reference database, Well, that depends upon the copyright holder for the original reference file. Copyright Holders have a few different options open to them. They can choose a setting that prompts you to to block access to the uploaded video entirely and automatically. So

let's say that I upload that Struts song. UH. It could be that the music label that represents the Struts has set this so that anytime someone does that, it just automatically delists the video. No one can see it. It's as if I didn't upload anything at all. Or they might choose to redirect monetization or enable monetization to go to the copyright holder rather than to the user

who uploaded the file. So again, if I uploaded it and I said, hey, I want to be able to monetize this file or this this video, maybe they would say, okay, you can monetize the video. It's just that all the revenue is going to come to us, not to you, because it's our content, not your content. Or they could even choose to do nothing at all and allow the

video to stand as is. Some content creators see this sort of sharing community as a way of promoting material, and they don't see it as competing against their own content, so they don't worry about whether or not someone owns it when they upload it. And in any case, you can even have it set so that you just get a notification whenever there is a match, and then you decided on a case by case basis. You don't have

to set your decision in advance and just walk away. Now, many people, including myself, have criticized the system for favoring copyright holders too much over individual users. There are times when it is perfectly legitimate to include someone else's content in a piece you are uploading to YouTube. For example, if you want to create a video the critiques a particular television show or film, and you're using clips to illustrate your points, you could argue that that falls under

the umbrella of fair use. You are commenting upon someone else's work and effectively creating new work as a result, so it's not that you are just presenting some and else's copywritten material. You're using that as an example to make a point. But fair use isn't a magic make your video untouchable for free card. It's a legal protection, and it only comes into play if you actually have to defend your use of content in a court of law.

Even then, the court decides whether or not your use of original content counts as fair use, and there's not really any hard and fast rules to do that. It's

all subjective. So you might find one of your videos taken down or demonetized, and at that point you can appeal the decision, and then it goes into a somewhat mysterious arbitration process where someone has to decide whether or not your video has its own merit, or if it derives all its value from containing someone else's work in it, It's kind of messy and it doesn't always come out in a way that you would expect now to be fair to YouTube. This process helps keep the company in business.

If Google did not make a show that it is proactive and removing infringing material, the company could be held responsible for allowing people to pirate content that could lead to expensive and lengthy court cases, such as the one that was finally settled in two thousand and fourteen with YouTube versus Viacom. So I do see all sides of

this issue. It's just a tough call when there are many cases of videos that seemed to have legitimate fair use arguments getting pulled down, and there have been more than a few cases of overzealous copyright holders taking down videos that either they put up themselves so they're taking down their own stuff, or their videos that didn't contain

any copyrighted protective material in them. So you might get a takedown notice from company and say, there's the thing in this video that infringes on any copyrights they own because it's all original, it has nothing to do with them. Sometimes that does happen, so it's far from perfect. All right, Let's get back to the history of YouTube and the videos that were really popular in One of those would be a video that helped launch a career into the

stratosphere and create a phenomenon. That would be Justin Bieber's Baby video. Now, Bieber had been uploading covers of various songs to YouTube for a couple of years, at least since two thousand and eight, and had sort of been discovered by accident by a producer who signed Biber to a record deal. In January, Bieber's video for Baby off his first album, hit YouTube and became an instant viral hit. It would go on to hit one billion views, although it still was not the first video to hit a

billion views. It would just do that over time. In fact, the first video to reach one billion views wouldn't come out for another two years. But I'm not going to talk about that yet. After Baby success, the world was plunged into a terrible plague called biber Fever. I appear to be one of the ones immune to it. I promise I'll carry on for all of you. Other big videos that year included the infamous Bed Intruders song Hidja Kids,

Hidja Wife. The video saw Antoine Dodson's interview on a local news station auto tuned into a song, which inspired a string of various auto tuned videos, including entire channels dedicated to editing videos and putting auto tuning behind them. It would also inspire the theme song for the Netflix

show The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. Later on, Old Spice launched an advertising campaign in twenty ten that reveled in masculine absurdity and started another trend of tongue in cheek advertising that spread to other companies like Duskies and Dollar Shave Club. We got the double Rainbow video in two and we still really don't know what that means. Okay Go did another music video that was really intricate and had some

mind blowing nature to it. It was a Rube Goldberg device and it was to the tune of this Too Shall Pass. They also did a second music video for that song featuring a marching band and Gilli suits. So they just were really in a creative spirit at that time. I think still are, to be honest, they still come out with crazy videos. Was also when a Swedish YouTuber

called Beauty Pie launched his YouTube channel. He uploaded video footage of various video games while providing odd commentary to them, and over time became insanely popular, eventually becoming the highest paid YouTuber on the platform and the YouTuber with the most subscriptions. Later, he would run into serious trouble with sponsors and partnerships after posting videos containing everything from racial

slurs to Nazi imagery. Well, I've got a lot more to talk about with YouTube until we get to the next breaking point for the next episode. Before I jump into this final segment, let's take a quick break to thank our sponsors. In two thousand and eleven, YouTube introduced its live feature, allowing users to broadcast live videos from a web camera or smartphone. Smartphones were well on their

way to transforming the online experience. More people were relying on their mobile devices to access the web and certain types of content like video. We're more conducive to that, though it took a little while for cellular networks to get fast enough to really make it a good experience. These days, I think se of all traffic to YouTube comes from mobile devices, so obviously transformative as far as

the way we consume content off the Internet. The live feature not only gave people the chance to broadcast any mundane thought they might have to the world at large Twitter, but also opened up the doors to user generated news coverage. Anyone with a YouTube account and a compatible device could stream video to the platform, giving the world a first

and glimpse into events anywhere. Forget a surveillance state. Now we live in a world where in many places practically everybody has quick access to a camera and a live feed to the world at large. That year, YouTube also launched its own original channels. The company acquired the Next New Networks, a programming distributor and aggregator. Next New Networks was a company that partnered with content creators to give them more visibility and give videos a better chance of

hooking and audience. YouTube was getting more serious about developing programming channels and platform specific networks. This was a push to move away from one off successful viral videos and to build more sustainable channels that could earn views across a channel's worth of videos, not just depend upon lightning in a bottle. The company continued to redesign its home page and interface in an effort to encourage even more

time spent on the site. By the end of more than three billion videos were being watched every day, and while the site had started up in the good old US of A, by two thousand eleven, more than seventy of all traffic came from outside the United States. They were closing in on one billion active users, and they would hit that goal before too much longer. The site had also created localized versions for twenty five different countries in forty three different languages. It was a juggernaut and

it was only going to get bigger. In the spring of two thousand eleven, YouTube software engineer James Zearn gave a peek behind the curtain and explained that the vast majority of YouTube's traffic focused on a relatively small number of videos. Specifically, he said thirty percent of the videos on YouTube demanded most of the traffic, with the remaining

seventy remaining relatively unseen. Now that brought up some other questions, such as how could YouTube turn a profit with such a business model, because if your company resources are earmarked to transcode and store videos, and sev of the videos you are using that effort on are never really being watched only a really getting any traffic? How could you make money off of advertising? One other thing that happened in two thousand eleven was the launch of Google Plus,

Google's attempt to create a social platform again to Facebook. Eventually, that platform would have a really big impact on YouTube, and it was not a positive one. But we'll learn more about what happened in the following episode. Two thousand eleven was also the year that the two remaining co founders at the company, Chad Hurley and Steve chen would leave YouTube. Keep in mind that co founder number three,

Joed Kareem, had left just after the Google acquisition. Right around that time, the two of them founded a new company called AVOs Systems a v O s. It was a startup incubator. In other words, they created a company that could help other tiny startup companies get some momentum

and grow. They would work together at AVOs until two thousand and fourteen, and at that point AVOs kind of shed its incubator status and transformed into one of the companies it had been developing, specifically a company called mixed Bit. This was a mobile video platform and it was Chad Hurley's passion. Hurley became the head of Mixed Bit and Chen would depart. He would go on to join Google Ventures as an entrepreneur in residence. Sounds like a pretty

sweet title in my mind. That marked the end of fifteen years of those two friends working together on the same projects. So it was the end of an era. But I know what you're asking, What were the really big videos of two thousand eleven? Right, Well, the most viewed video of that year was a bit of a vanity projects, a music video of an original song featuring a young woman named Rebecca Black. And if that name doesn't ring a bell, then you may not be down

with Friday. Two thousand eleven was when the song Friday hit YouTube and became a huge viral sensation. People loved making fun of it, including Stephen Colbert, who performed a moving rendition of the song on television. Personally, while I think the song is pretty much vapid and silly, and the video also very silly, it was a birthday present. If my parents had had the money to give me that kind of a gift when I was a kid,

you better believe I would have asked for it. I just lived in a or grew up in a in an era where you didn't have to worry about your goofy birthday wishes being broadcast to the world at large and then being held up as a thing of ridicule. Uh that being said, it is it is remarkably bad. Other videos that were popular in this time included one in which a a dog was being teased about food

like a sandwich. The video included a voice over to give us the dog's reactions, which mostly involved being really sad that the dog's owner claimed to not only have either thrown away or eaten a lot of food, but even gone so far as to give a sandwich to the cat. There's a cute video of twin babies having a babbling conversation with one another gets pretty intense. The nan Cat debuted in two thousand eleven and infected our brains with an Naan song along with rainbows and pop tarts.

There was a Volkswagen commercial featuring a kid using the Force Star Wars style that got a lot of views. And this brings me to the point where I mentioned that YouTube is kind of remarkable because it's the place where people will go and seek out commercials, whereas in nearly every other venue. You can imagine people go out of their way to try and avoid watching commercials. It's an odd thing, but I guess it all is when you watch on your time versus when it's forced upon you.

In two thousand twelve, YouTube was getting four billion views every day. Now you might wonder how that breaks down. Well, if you break it down, it means that there are forty six thousand, two hundred nine six views being generated every second. And that was also the year that first saw the first video to hit one billion views, though, as I've mentioned already, some videos that had been up on the site for a few years would eventually hit

that milestone as well. The video was, as I'm sure most of you know, the music video for a Gongnam style by the artist's side. Now, this was a real sensation, with tons of references and parodies to follow, But the music video itself, it's just an incredibly absurd and surreal series of scenes set to infectious music. It's a video of excess and silliness, and it played right into YouTube sweet spot for videos that have wide share. Herbal appeal is the sort of thing people would watch and then

immediately sent to their circle of friends. Who would then watch it again and then would send it to their circle of friends, and so on and so forth. Now, at the beginning of CEO, Salar Kamanda said that the third wave of mass media was breaking, and he identified the first two waves as the era of broadcast television and then the era of cable television. Now, he said, was the era of online video, in which more niche

subjects would receive attention and promotion. So while we saw cable channels pop up around focused subjects like food or animals or science, these online videos could get even more granular than that. They could cater to a smaller but passionate viewer base. At least, that was the hope, and YouTube put some money behind that prediction quite a bit of an In fact, YouTube partnered with content created years

and formed about one hundred premium content channels. The company poured around one hundred million dollars into that effort to both form and promote those channels, followed by another two hundred million dollars later on in an investment in advertising and marketing courtesy of Google. Now, some of those channels featured celebrities, some featured YouTubers who had become popular through their own channels, and some were partnerships with existing companies.

All of the channels received investment on some level from YouTube to produce their shows. A few famous ones included source fed, which was founded by Philip DeFranco and had a lot of notable folks work there for a while. Eventually that would get adopted or or acquired really by Discovery Communications. There was Geek and Sundry, which is a nerd culture channel helmed by actress Felicia Day and has other people like Huil Wheaton in it. Um there's another

early launch. There were some nals that were part of the initial launch. They're still around and thriving. Geek and Sundry is one of those that was still around. Source Fed after it was acquired by Discovery Communications was eventually and effectively shut down and dissolved, kind of absorbed into the rest of Discovery Communications online digital efforts. Some of those premium channels just sort of faded away without much

warning or lamentation. Now there's so much more to talk about with YouTube, but I feel this is a good place to end here. At sort of the beginning of twelve, when the premium channels were first announced, In our next episode, we're gonna explore how Google made the decision to unite YouTube and Google Plus log ins, how that move completely backfired on the company, how the YouTube Kids app went off the rails, and lots more weird stories about the

third most popular website in the world. So I hope you joined me for that. If you guys have suggestions for topics I should cover in future episodes of tech Stuff, you should write me. My email address for the show is tech Stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle of both of those is tech Stuff hs W. Let me know if there's a topic you want me to cover, or a guest you want me to have on the show, anything like that. Drop me a line

and tell me. If you want to watch me record these shows live, go to twitch dot tv slash tech Stuff. You'll find a schedule there. You can go over and join and be part of the chat room and watch as I fumble my way through all of the history of technology from the dawn of time up until last Wednesday. And uh, it's pretty exciting stuff. I look forward to seeing you there and I will talk to you again

about YouTube really soon. For more on this and fathoms of other topics, how staff works dot Com eight