san francisco The video portal YouTube has changed the way moving images are perceived globally. The platform represents the promise that anyone can reach an audience of billions. The children’s song “Babyshark” alone has generated more than eleven billion views.
From Silicon Valley, a small team led by the three founders Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim formed a global media empire. An important reason: In contrast to many other portals, YouTube gave the video creators a share of the advertising revenue shortly after it was founded in 2005. For the past year alone, the platform reported a whopping $28 billion in advertising revenue.
In his book “Youtube. The Global Superpower” (English original title: “Like, Comment, Subscribe”) after the rise of Youtube. He describes its beginnings in a rat-infested office, its $1.65 billion sale to Google a year after it was founded, and its current size. More than 500 hours of video footage is uploaded to Youtube every minute.
In his book, the journalist from the Bloomberg news agency also describes how strongly YouTube shapes the Internet. “No company has done more to create the online attention economy we all live in today,” writes Bergen.
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The platform’s algorithm keeps feeding the audience with new suggestions in order to keep them on the platform for as long as possible. Youtube turns this attention into money.
Youtube as a profit machine
YouTube is also very popular in Germany. Last year, the portal had 48 million users, this year it should already be 52 million, according to calculations by the statistics portal Statista.
For the Google group Alphabet, YouTube was a profit machine for years. The servers were running efficiently. At the same time, the parent company hardly intervened in the content on the platform.
That has changed. Due to the spread of hate, violence and conspiracy theories, Youtube today represents the dark side of the Internet portals. The non-profit Mozilla Foundation evaluated data from 22,722 users of the platform for a study. It turned out that unwanted content can hardly be kept away.
Even when users actively flagged videos such as hate speech, scenes of war, or traffic accidents as “unwanted,” they continued to see many similar videos. Mozilla suspects that YouTube deliberately designs its algorithm for maximum attention span – no matter what the user community wants.
Bergen’s research goes in a similar direction. He shows how YouTube sticks to controversial star Felix Kjellberg when he makes anti-Semitic and racist statements.
Bergen contrasts this with the income from Kjellberg via his YouTube channel PewDiePie. In the period from 2012 to 2019 alone, Kjellberg earned around 38.8 million dollars from advertising and Youtube 23 million.
However, the situation became even more dramatic. In March 2019, New Zealand experienced the worst terrorist attack in its history. A gunman shot dead 51 people and streamed his act live – initially on Facebook. Copies then appeared on YouTube. During the killings, the man said, “Remember to subscribe to the PewDiePie channel.”
Mark Bergen: YouTube The Global Superpower
Droemer Knaur Verlag
Munich 2022
544 pages
24.00 euros
In an analysis, New Zealand’s government later concluded that YouTube had played an important role in radicalizing the attacker. During the interrogations, the perpetrator testified that YouTube was an important “inspiration” for him.
When the pressure on YouTube increased in the United States, longtime boss Susan Wojcicki reacted and issued stricter rules for the platform, writes Bergen. It is also thanks to her that YouTube is not perceived as negatively as Facebook.
Wojcicki is also repeatedly traded as a promising candidate for the top post at Google parent company Alphabet. Nevertheless, Bergen ultimately makes a sobering judgment about the top manager: “Few in Silicon Valley or Hollywood would describe Wojcicki as a visionary or today’s YouTube as a hotbed of innovation.”
You control the portal, although it has been safe for eight years. Youtube stands under her but neither for innovation nor for transparency. Bergen suspects that this may also be due to the fact that their power is limited. “Even if she wanted to, Wojcicki could probably not steer the company completely in a certain direction.” Youtube ultimately developed a life of its own.
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