YouTube: How It Started, How It’s Going

READ MORE: Inside YouTube’s Secret Algorithm Wars (Observer)

READ MORE: Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination

When congressional leaders grilled social media executives last year about spreading misinformation on the 2020 election and COVID-19, most of the heat was on Facebook, Twitter, and the search engine Google. Far less attention is focused on YouTube, which last year earned $28 billion in ad revenue and which has more than two billion viewers around the world.

In a new book, technology and business journalist Mark Bergen writes that YouTube has ushered in a world of abundant content and creativity of influencers and online hustlers, while also driving up information overload and fomenting culture wars.

“Almost every day, YouTube’s engineers experiment on us without our knowledge,” Bergen writes in Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination (reprinted excerpts of which can be read at Observer). “They tweak video recommendations for subsets of users, review the results, and tweak again.”

Listen to This: YouTube’s Uneasy World Domination — With Mark Bergen

Such a reveal is hardly new. We know that social media platforms deploy algorithms to feed us more of what they think will keep us engaged (and a big part of that is feeding us content that gets our blood up). Bergen says YouTube was the first to do this and details how its desire to get its users to spend more time on videos got out of hand in ways they didn’t anticipate or could manage.

It started out with a utopian ideal to do no evil. In Silicon Valley at the time of the company’s founding in 2005, there was a belief that information should be free and be accessible along with broadcast and video, Bergen says.

“YouTube was one of many [such projects] but early on leapfrogged its competitors in part because it was so accessible and easy to use,” he tells Dave Davies at NPR. “The founders talked about this as something that their mom should be able to use. And I think, to their credit, that’s one of the reasons for its success.”

READ MORE: How YouTube became one of the planet’s most influential media businesses (NPR)

In a Q&A with Grace Buono for Fast Company, Bergen described his key findings about the rise of YouTube:

“When I initially started reading about Google, YouTube was very much a Hollywood story. There weren’t as many conversations about some of the issues with content moderation and algorithmic amplification that we see today, and all these things that have come up during the Trump era. There were a couple things that I learned about YouTube. One, this fixation that YouTube had on metrics was so important. It’s the driving philosophy behind Google, too: objectives and key results.

“YouTube was measuring watchtime as its gold standard metric, and a lot of the decisions they made were based on that metric without really having pieces in place to deal with downstream effects. The second [thing] is people were telling me that to really understand YouTube, you have to go back into history and understand the Viacom lawsuit.

“Some of YouTube’s early issues with copyright policy and the people making the important decisions at the company cut their teeth over the lawsuit.”

READ MORE: How the YouTube platform paved the way for today’s social media (Fast Company)

Bergen reports that a decade ago YouTube endeavored to treat all videos equally. If footage didn’t break copyright or graphic violence rules, YouTube thought it belonged on its site and in its promotional machine.

“YouTube didn’t love clickbait — videos that lured viewers in under false pretenses or sent them away quickly,” Bergen notes at Observer. “So in 2012 it changed the way it recommended videos, moving from a system that favored clicks (or views) to one that favored time spent or watchtime. Clickbait soon went away. And huge new content categories emerged — gaming, beauty, vlogging — while YouTube’s ads business took off.”

One particular category exploded out of nowhere after the algorithmic switch: toy unboxing. The videos were enthralling for young viewers, but didn’t seem that educational. YouTube considered toy unboxing videos the equivalent of sugary snacks, writes Bergen. “Best in moderation. YouTube was worried that gorging on them might make viewers (or their parents) abandon YouTube.”

Because of this, later in 2012, YouTube began an initiative internally dubbed “Nutritious and Delicious.” The idea was to assign a ‘goodness score’ to certain videos or channels, giving them more weight in rankings. But it never got off the ground.

According to Bergen, YouTube was preoccupied with the rising threat Facebook represented, “making it worry more about its survival than your nutrition. Staff also got stuck on certain questions: What exactly is nutritious? How do we decide? Can we program quality into algorithms? Should we? No company-wide metrics were set.”

So overall watchtime, YouTube’s gold standard for time spent on its videos, stuck. More recently, of course, the company has had to revisit those questions of a content’s qualitative equivalence once more — this time forced to do so to keep on the right side of regulators.

“Since 2019, its recommendation algorithm now demotes ‘borderline’ videos, those that get uncomfortably close to being harmful. YouTube has also done more to disclose how it decides what’s borderline and how it scores the ‘authoritativeness’ of publishers, key components of its responsibility push.”

The corporate conundrum, arguably faced by Facebook and other social media platforms, is that so-called “valued watchtime” — content judged to be suitable for consumption — pushes back against the demand to increase total viewing time.

Bergen is prepared to cut YouTube some slack. Partly, it has been hard to change direction because the company doesn’t even understand its own algorithm. The sheer scale of the data it absorbs everyday makes the task a titanic one.

“YouTube has more monthly users in India than Twitter has globally,” he tells Nilay Patel at The Verge. “It is just so big. I think that Google tends to make every decision at scale and as consistently across the board as possible.

“Philosophically, it really struggles with, ‘We are going to act on one creator this way and another one this way. We are going to act on one misinformation case this way and then treat another one differently.’ It wants to do as much as it can, across the board, at scale.”

READ MORE: Everyone knows what YouTube is — few know how it really works (The Verge)

It is unique in some ways, because it is the only social network that hasn’t really had one founder there the entire time. There is no Zuckerberg, Dorsey, or Spiegel, Bergen notes. It effectively had three different eras as chief executives that are stewards of this platform that is like its own beast.

Unlike Facebook in particular, Google/YouTube also has no obvious figurehead to attack. Turns out that the CEO of YouTube, Susan Wojcicki, wouldn’t talk to Bergen. Nor would the founders of Google. (Although, to be fair, Larry Page and Sergey Brin haven’t spoken to anyone on record since 2015.)

“I think they’re aware of the criticism of the platform,” Bergan tells Lucas Shaw at Bloomberg. [Former CEO Google] Eric Schmidt has criticized social media publicly. I believe he called it a megaphone for idiots. Though he’s talked about how YouTube is different.”

Bergen did interview more than 150 current and former employees across YouTube and Google and found most of them see YouTube as a positive force.

“Most people feel that it has had a positive impact on the world,” he reports. “People inside YouTube do genuinely believe that they’ve created a chance for people who have been marginalized in conventional media to have a platform. Even people that are supercritical of the company celebrate the creator economy and have favorite YouTubers.”

READ MORE: How A Video Search Engine Became the World’s Most Influential Media Company (Bloomberg)

Kevin Lozano, in his review for The New Yorker, describes the evolution of his own long-running YouTube habit, noting that “Among the titans of social media, YouTube is sometimes overlooked.”

Lozano continues: “It has not attracted as much adulation, censure, theorizing, or scrutiny as its rivals Facebook and Twitter. Its founders are not public figures on the order of Mark Zuckerberg or Jack Dorsey. Aaron Sorkin hasn’t scripted a movie about YouTube.”

He agrees with Bergan’s argument that YouTube “set the stage for modern social media, making decisions throughout its history that shaped how attention, money, ideology, and everything else worked online,” pointing out that “It’s one thing to attract attention on the Internet; it’s another thing to turn attention into money, and this is where YouTube has excelled.”

Bergen writes that the website was “paying people to make videos when Facebook was still a site for dorm-room flirting, when Twitter was a techie fad, and a decade before TikTok existed.”

But as Lozano comments, “Posting on Facebook or Twitter might net you social capital, an audience, or even a branded-content deal, but the benefits of uploading videos to YouTube are more tangible: its users can get a cut of the company’s revenue.”

In other words, the founding of YouTube marks the birth of the today’s creator economy.

READ MORE: How YouTube Created the Attention Economy (The New Yorker)

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