Every two-bit Web startup claims it’s going to change the world. How many actually, honestly did? One springs to mind – but it didn’t do it alone.
YouTube is five years old, a milestone guaranteed to make everyone else feel older. It was late 2005 when two young entrepreneurs hatched the idea of a video site to which anyone could upload, and whose videos could be shared on any Web page. By 2006, it had already made a mark when Google bought it for $1.6-billion, a number that even laypeople could agree was really very large. Today, it gets more than two billion page views a day.
YouTube clips have changed lives, propelled revolutions and given us Justin Bieber (a mixed record). But its success was hardly assured. In fact, its very survival through five years of financial doubt and endless litigation is slightly miraculous. How did this strange and wonderful beast live five years to straddle the world? Let us count five ways:
1) Deep pockets
As much as anything, YouTube is an infrastructure. Is your hard drive almost full of silly multimedia? Multiply that demand for storage by, oh, a planet, and you see YouTube’s challenge. Powering and running computers isn't cheap. Nor is enduring endless negotiations and litigation with the media giants that own so much of the content. (A lawsuit launched by Viacom is ongoing.) On top of which, in 2005, nobody knew how to make money on video. For years, Google openly admitted it was losing considerable sums on it.
And don't overlook the importance of size itself. YouTube is YouTube because it's big. More often than not, if it's online it's on YouTube. But scale comes at a cost, and it's a good thing that YouTube could draw on Google-sized reserves to make it so.
2) Weaselly perseverance
Copyrighted videos have always been a big part of YouTube's appeal, whether or not the company wants to admit it.
The site's motto was “Broadcast Yourself”, but it was really more like, “Broadcast other people's stuff and see who complains.” Early on, it started heeding takedown notices from aggrieved rights-holders, and it seemed for a while that it might eliminate copyrighted clips entirely, leaving behind a wasteland of burping-baby videos.
Instead we got a curious dance that continues to this day. On one hand, some rights-holders continue to play whack-a-mole with determined users who keep uploading their stuff. Other media owners appear to have given up – or at least made peace with the idea of YouTube. Still others have bought into Google's schemes for sharing ad revenues.
YouTube evidently has a pretty good idea of what's being uploaded (the fact that it remains largely porn-free is a telling achievement). But rather than locking the place down, it finds ways to maximize what users can upload while skirting – so far – death by lawyers. The result is a bubbling ecosystem of clips, remixes, tributes and shows uploaded in their entirety that pushes the boundaries of how we imagine media to be owned.
3) Good ideas
YouTube didn't invent online video. Documentary footage of exploding whales and mortified adolescents had graced the Web for years. But YouTube got a few things right, and at just the right moment.
Late 2005 was a time when online video was mostly played through unwieldy plug-ins that took a long time to load.
YouTube videos, on the other hand, were fast, crisp and loaded without the thumb-screw torture of RealPlayer. More importantly, they could be embedded in other Web pages, so you didn't have to visit YouTube.com to watch them. (Shocking, you say? In 2005, it was downright noteworthy. I know this: I’ve looked at my notes.) This made YouTube not just a destination, but a utility that threaded its tendrils through millions of pages.
4) A duck being eaten by a pelican
A friend of mine is totally taken with a YouTube video of a duck being swallowed whole by a pelican. I don't believe this was the achievement he hoped would land him in the newspaper, but he was the one who insisted on forwarding it. A duck being eaten by a pelican.
But notice how I used the term “YouTube video.” It was instantly clear what I was talking about. YouTube's openness, easiness and sheer scale made it a magnet for silly little videos. It became the Internet's junk drawer – and it flourished in that capacity. The distraction-based economy is growing, and YouTube is at its core.
5) An indigenous culture
The moment I say the words “YouTube celebrity,” you'll roll your eyes. I suppose they deserve it, too. The Chocolate Rain guy. The Leave Britney Alone guy. Lonelygirl15 (remember that peculiar hype bubble?).
But these were more than curios destined for 15 minutes of mainstream media attention. They were expressions of the fact that YouTube had become a community unto itself.
This was important for a few reasons. For one, it helped the site become a creative hive, with ideas, encouragement and rivalry bouncing from one user to the next. For another, it created an inner world that seemed bizarre and alluring from the outside. YouTube became a digital Orient, a strange place that everyone had heard of even if few understood it. For years, the media would report on the latest kooky goings-on in YouTube-land, boosting its notoriety.
And so it is that YouTube continues to be more than the sum of its parts – and it has billions of parts: creative engine, musical archive, cultural depot, mass media outlet, purveyor of quality kitten videos to the world.
Never let it be said that the occasional leviathan doesn’t do us good.
