As of this writing, it registers 20 million unique users per month, with over 100 million videos viewed daily and 65,000 new videos uploaded every day. 1 Measured on the basis of user popularity, it has quickly become the single most successful space for digital media, challenging traditional content providers to reinvent themselves in the digital environment. The site eludes a definitive analysis with its brief lifespan and minimalist structure as a platform for collaboration, an empty space that produces no content and serves only to provide the basic organizational framework. Underlying its success is a small amount of creative coding and a very broad and active user community, yet if we are to understand the impact of digital media on contemporary society, this is precisely what makes it interesting. YouTube is testing some of our most fundamental assumptions about the role of media in society and the potential of online communities to collaboratively participate in its creation and distribution. Perhaps the most direct evidence of its impact has been the concerted effort by leading news media organizations including the New York Times, Reuters, BBC and CNN to create their own user-contributed (though highly moderated) media content areas for videos, photos and commentary.

Founded by former PayPal colleagues Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, YouTube is essentially a social networking site, a shared community video blog with millions of content authors who have been given a powerful if limited set of editing rights. Housed in a loft above a pizza parlor in San Mateo California, it is the quintessential Silicon Valley startup of the post-dot-com era, relying on the convergence of a broad range of existing technologies referred to as Web 2.0. This phase in the evolution of the Web (though skeptics like Nicholas Carr see more hype than reality here) is marked by techniques that give Web applications a desktop-like level of interactivity through the use of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), opening access to data through application programming interfaces (API’s) and the utilization of Flash and other technologies. YouTube itself is largely dependent on Flash for server-side conversion of videos to FLV (Flash Video format) to make the files playable within a Web browser. As the FlashInsider Web site has noted, it is a fairly simple task to create a video share site, using FFMpeg to process the FLV encoding, FLVtools2 for writing meta information, and utilizing FlowPlayer for embedding Flash content. The remarkable aspect of YouTube (a lesson for innovators) was to not invent a new file format but to rely on the popularity of a near ubiquitous technology that works within the vast majority of browsers—Adobe Flash, which was originally intended to deliver small Web animations.

This new social architecture of the Web entails a fundamental paradigm shift where power is located in communities rather than institutions or organizations and ownership of data gives way to end-user creation, aggregation and redistribution of content. Google Maps is a popular example of an AJAX application, providing users with access to its database of listings and empowering them to appropriate and “mashup” the data to create new resources and services. The new data can range from the whimsical to the functional or creative, transforming the Web from a collection of disparate pages within a one-to-many framework to a community-designed global database (and perhaps, in the long term, an operating system). In keeping with this paradigm, YouTube implements a user-centric Web site where a database of content is created, appropriated and shared by a community of users. However, Lawrence Lessig has recently pointed to a basic difference in the structure of YouTube and Google, arguing that the latter provides greater access while YouTube directs appropriated content back to itself. This is a critical distinction in understanding the design of Web 2.0 implementations, but the extensive popularity of YouTube suggests that it has not been of major concern to end-users. While YouTube blocks the re-editing of original media files uploaded to the site (a limit evaded through readily available shareware applications), it is inverting the traditional paradigm of top-down distribution and placement of media files. Drawing the vast majority of its files through content uploaded by it online community, YouTube is itself an empty site, a void in the Web that would never have emerged except for the actions of its users.

The founders of YouTube were originally seeking a simple way to share personal videos, and the first file uploaded in April 2005—Chen’s video of his cat playing with a string—conveys an innocence that concealed the site’s radical implications. The site not only simplifies the process of uploading and viewing digital media, it situates media files within a social networking architecture that fosters the development of an online community through common Web 2.0 activities—commenting, tagging, subscription feeds, and embeddable content. Users who become members can tag and comment on videos (their own or those of other users), “subscribe” to the work of other content producers, and create their own YouTube sites. With a 100 million videos available on any given day, this is TV with a vengeance, an inverted broadcast distribution system: “channels” are personalized to the tastes of individual viewers and everything is “on” all the time, without regard to the traditional limits of program scheduling or a predetermined number of available video streams (cable TV’s not so old innovation of multiple channels suddenly fades in significance). Media files are categorized through a variety of user-centered techniques, measuring popularity through a viewer rating system, frequency of viewing and commenting, and analysis of linking activities. This emphasis on user interaction with other members of the online community to organize content has been an essential focus of its founders. “From Day One we concentrated on building a service and community around video,” says Chen. “That made us a lot different from the iTunes and the Googles out there.” Like any effective community, it feeds off itself, not only in terms of its own content creation, but in creating its own social capital.

This focus on the empowerment of the user community can be seen in the thousands of videos uploaded to YouTube, from simple home movies and political satires, to creative media products that would find little welcome in traditional distribution channels. The site represents a unique opportunity for Web users to discover new modes of self-expression and work together in the creation of media content. The announcement accompanying the second round of funding from Sequoia Capital articulated the ideal:

YouTube is the largest community on the Web for shortform video, with tens of thousands of clips uploaded every day by indie filmmakers and musicians, professional content creators, and anyone with a video camera or camcorder. Entertainment by its nature is both a personal and communal experience and YouTube is providing the stage. Everyone can express themselves by creating content and distributing it through YouTube—and our community decides which videos rise to the top. 6

But reaching beyond self-expression and entertainment, the site also fosters a visual dialogue on contemporary social and political issues and may serve to enhance our overall media literacy (a possibility that educators should take seriously). An intriguing example of a media-based dialogue appeared in summer 2006 with the posting of a segment of a professionally produced video, Climate Change Graph Explained by Sir David Attenborough. The video not only stimulated numerous comments and ratings from other users, but the posting of additional videos that supported or offered alternative perspectives on the climate change debate, setting the stage for an extended visual dialogue. (BBC eventually requested that the Attenborough video be removed.) Other, more creative examples on the site include the video Bike Theft by the well-known Neistat brothers, who as independent film makers in New York City have created over 200 films (including the million download expose of the battery problems with Apple’s iPods). The Bike Theft video, where they repeatedly pretend to steal their own bike on Manhattan streets without intervention of nearby pedestrians, perked the interest of a local TV station once it appeared on YouTube. Filming a sequel to the initial video in the presence of a live TV news crew, they mock the sensationalism of contemporary news broadcasts by faking the accidental amputation of a finger and then filming the initial shock and indignant (on-air) reaction of Jodi Applegate, the Fox Network News reporter.8

The Attenborough video highlights a number of critical issues raised by YouTube in its rapid evolution as a mediafocused social networking site. First, it has repeatedly run into the increasingly narrow limits on the appropriation of material for fair-use, becoming a flash point for the conflict between the easy transferability of digitally based content and traditional distribution models. YouTube also raises questions as to how a site founded essentially on a self-selecting community of content producers can pursue a business model that solicits financial support from commercial advertisers—while asking that they forgo their traditional modes of influence. Both media producers and advertisers, who know where they stand in a structured broadcast distribution system, suddenly find their work appropriated for new uses or placed in unanticipated contexts. Finally, YouTube shares a challenge that underlies other social networking sites such as MySpace in that its empowerment of a user community results in a fragile relationship of dependency. In meeting legal requirements for use of shared material and pursuing a viable business plan, it runs the risk of alienating its own user base. With no permanent investment in the site (outside of time) the online community can dissolve easily and re-emerge on alternative sites that offer greater flexibility and autonomy.

Each of these issues have already had an impact on both YouTube and traditional media players, forcing the former to revise its relationship to its users while simultaneously serving as a catalyst for a fundamental transformation of the traditional media landscape. With the appearance of lengthy, copyrighted files on the site earlier this year, YouTube found it necessary to create a new membership level for users who desire to post files longer than ten minutes. Indeed, bloggers such as Jason Calacanis have argued that the primary basis of the site’s success has been the combination of a simple technology that fosters the appropriation of other users’ content with a willful disregard of this issue. Calacanis has a point: For a brief period, a search on Google for videos of the popular NBC show Saturday Night Live (SNL) resulted in YouTube being listed ahead of the SNL area of the NBC site for access to the network’s own video clips.10 Months later, the search returns the same results, but the actual media files have been removed from YouTube. A significant number of videos remain on the site that are under copyright, though no one seems able to determine the extent of the violations. Potential solutions to this challenge may eventually be feasible through initiatives such as the Venice Project of Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis (creators of the pioneering applications Kazaa and Skype), but at present copyright violations must be addressed individually.11 YouTube insists that it immediately removes material when notified of a violation, but with 65,000 new videos uploaded daily and a limited number of employees, it is dependent on the selfmonitoring capability of the community. The recent request by 23 broadcasters and other organizations in Japan to delete 29,549 videos suggests that the abuse may be far broader than it has acknowledged publically.12

Until its recent acquisition by Google, YouTube faced a fundamental challenge in implementing a viable business model even though its production to distribution cost ratio is in stark contrast to traditional media providers. While it is estimated to have approximately 40% of the market share of online video viewing, YouTube’s primary expenditure lies in the distribution (bandwidth) of media. In effect, YouTube is a network where both production costs and creative control have been transferred to the audience, a development that may have far reaching ramifications for future media production. But while overall costs are minimal, adequate revenue streams remain elusive due to advertiser apprehension over the fluid and unpredictable dynamics of the online community. With users exercising a significant influence over content placement, YouTube has yet to provide advertisers with the means to control the positioning of commercial content. This is hardly unique to media sites (consider the now classic Google search for “miserable failure” which still pulls up the biography of our current President), but YouTube is struggling to balance the demands of advertisers with the authority of the community within a single for-profit site. Ironically, some companies have imitated YouTube’s short-form video format, creating their own videos to sustain viral marketing campaigns. But the blurring of traditional boundaries between commercial support and content (already undermined to a degree by Hollywood’s infatuation with product placement) presents its own challenges. YouTube provided an example of how tenuous the distinction between media content and advertising might become in the lonelygirl15 video hoax. Millions of YouTube users gravitated to videos of a young girl’s growing rebellion over her home confinement; videos were eventually unmasked as a concealed promotional effort for Jessica Rose, who was pursuing an acting career. This particular instance of self-promotion raised questions on how viewers will determine what is real and what is staged for commercial gain on the site (though few commentators have noted the constructive role of the online community in uncovering this hoax).13

Finally, the past six months has seen a number of developments that suggest YouTube is moving to reposition itself, signing content distribution deals with NBC, Warner Music Group, and other media players, in order to create branded sites and to host promotional videos from scheduled TV shows.14 While the full import of these developments is not clear, John Dvorak’s observations on the future of Digg. com, the community generated news site, may be helpful. Dvorak noted that Digg.com’s effectiveness as a social networking site depends largely on sustaining a “community of like-minded people with broad interests . . . imbued with idealism regarding the usefulness of technology.”15 For Dvorak, the viability of an online community is grounded in its shared purpose; YouTube’s rapid expansion and need for funding runs the risk of undermining the creative voice and idealism of its most active members. Seneca famously noted that “it is the quality rather than the quantity that matters,” and the remarkable innovation of YouTube was to place this determination initially entirely in the hands of its online community.

Whether the creative energy represented by the Neistat brothers and other artists is pushed aside and replaced by the professionally developed (and well-funded) work of more established studios remains to be seen. Of greater concern may be a recent licensing agreement with CBS, which altered a basic structural component of YouTube’s CBS video area by both moderating user commentary and placing it on a separate page. YouTube suddenly finds itself caught between the corporate desire for controlled feedback and a core user community that may quickly move elsewhere if it feels its own voice has been silenced.

Finally, we should take note of the way YouTube undermines the traditional media distribution paradigm through the option to embed uploaded files in other locations. YouTube’s “embeddable player” feature empowers users to act on their own preferences, transferring media content to personal blogs and Web sites and thus shift meaning through recontextualization. Traditional media production may have been moving in this direction for some time, but now individual users become context creators, gaining control over the ultimate placement of media. A number of sites work derivatively off of YouTube in this respect, and a new category of digital media is evolving, Videws (see http://www.videws.com/), in which videos are aggregated with other media resources or news sites to create user designed broadcasts. And in a way, it suggests that YouTube is also playing (perhaps unconsciously) with the basis of its own existence, since recontextualized files may ultimately have little connection with their original source. Even though the embedded file is drawn from YouTube’s own servers, users will tend to associate the videos with their current settings in other blogs or Web sites. One might wonder what the ultimate purpose of YouTube might be, having come this far. Perhaps Web 3.0—whatever else that entails—will be marked by the non-Web site, the site that effaces itself in its own creation and in support of an emerging online community.

In an April 2006 article in Wired Magazine, Chen suggested that YouTube needed another nine months to resolve the challenges “. . . before this idea really hits the mainstream.”16 Nine months have come and gone, and the intervening period has brought continued growth, a sudden purchase by Google, the renewed threat of lawsuits over copyright violations, and negotiations for content distribution arrangements with traditional providers. Hardly mainstream, but surely a thorn in everyone’s side (except, perhaps Google’s). The financial concerns have been resolved by the acquisition, though Google now finds itself in the paradoxical position of being considered both a potential target of legal action and a possible partner in innovative video distribution deals with the same media companies. The broader issues raised by the creation and distribution of media through a social networking site remain, even if YouTube’s identity is subsumed under the Google corporate mantle. While YouTube has been shifting closer in alignment with the interests of established media producers, its first significant update since the acquisition introduced a deliciously radical feature in keeping with the original mission: It now offers a Quick Capture option that allows users to post a video to the site directly through the act of recording it. While there are technical issues to be resolved here (Quick Capture requires a webcam and text capabilities for title and description, and it lacks editing options), one can only anticipate the deeper and more complex implications of a world permeated with a ubiquitous video presence. Combined with the ongoing miniaturization of video devices, this may be an initial step to a social environment where every event may be unknowingly recorded, redefining our most basic assumptions of public and private space, of the conduct our political and social lives, and ultimately, how we share our very identities with each other. If blogging today endures criticism from some traditional quarters for its immediacy and lack of editorial control, it may soon seem quaintly out of date in a media saturated environment predicated on absolute immediacy of visual recording, distribution, and recontextualization.

To fully grasp the significance of YouTube would require, if not the perspective of history, at least a few more years (only now are we beginning to appreciate the role played by Napster in the music industry). We are situated in the opening scenes of a drama in which we are simultaneously actors and critics in a radically fluid environment. The major players may quickly disappear (or perhaps only feign their disappearance to surface again), and bit players in far corners of the stage may have the power to transform everything. For the moment, YouTube embodies the profound convergence of the underlying dynamics of the digital revolution. Its ultimate fate will say much about the significance of digital media in contemporary society and thepotential of self-organizing, online communities to take ownership of the creative process in media production and distribution of content.

Footnotes:

1. Nelson NetRatings, “YouTube U.S. Web Traffic Grows 75% Week Over Week,” (July 21, 2006), http://www.netratings. com/pr/pr_060721_2.pdf. (November 2, 2006).
2. Russell Heimlick, “How to Create Your Own YouTube Site,” Flash Insider: The Unofficial Flash Weblog (July 26, 2006), http://www.flashinsider.com/2006/07/26/how-to-createyour- own-youtube-site/. (July 29, 2006).
3. Dion Hinchcliffe, “The Shift to Social Computing,” ZD Net. The Enterprise Web 2.0 Blog, (March 12, 2006), http://blogs. zdnet.com/Hinchcliffe/index.php?p=21. (August 4, 2006).
4. Lawrence Lessig, “The Ethics of Web 2.0: YouTube vs. Flickr, Revver, Eyespot, blip.tv, and even Google,” Lessig Blog (October 20, 2006), http://www.lessig.org/blog/. (October 20, 2006).
5. Heather Green, “Way Beyond Home Videos,” Business Week (April 10, 2006).
6. Donna Bogatan, “YouTube Now ‘Entertainment Destination’: Partners with NBC, Courts CBS,” ZD Net: Digital Micro-markets, http://blogs.zdnet.com/micro-markets/ ?p=238. (July 26, 2006)
7. YouTube Video. “Climate Change Explained by Sir David Attenborough,” posted May 25, 2006. http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=rD1dnP_k8Yc&search=
8. Wikipedia entry, “Neistat Brothers,” page last modified October 19, 2006, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neistat_Brothers. (October 20, 2006).
9. Jason McCabe Calacanis, “How YouTube Won: Great SEO + Stolen Content (or ‘the biggest hit and run in the history of the Internet’),” Calacanis.com Blog (May 11, 2006), http:// www.calacanis.com/2006/05/11 /how-youtube-won-greatseo- stolen-content-or-the-biggest-hit/.(August 6, 2006).
10. Google search results, 28 July 2006, http://www.google. com/search?&q=snl+video, accessed 6 August 2006.
11. Steven Rosenbush, “Kazaa, Skype and Now the Venice Project,” Business Week Online, (July 24, 2006), http://www. businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/jul2006/ db20060724_713810.htm?chan=tc&campaign_id=rss_tech. (August 6, 2006).
12. Martyn Williams, “YouTube Deletes 30,000 Files on Request by Japan,” ComputerWorld, (October 20, 2006), http://www. computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1793634095. (October 20, 2006).
13. Chris Stevens, “Truth or Illusion: What’s Real on YouTube?” Cnet, (September 18, 2006), http://crave.cnet.co.uk/0,3902 9477,49283663,00.htm.
14. Mark Glaser, “NBC, YouTube Cross-Promotion off to Crass Start,” Mediashift, (June 29, 2006), http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/ 2006/06/sleeping_with_the_enemynbc_you.html. (August 8, 2006).
15. John Dvorak, “Understanding Digg and its Utopian Idealism,” PCmag.com, (June 26, 2006), http://www.pcmag. com/article2/0,1895,1981824,00.asp. (August 1, 2006).
16. WiredNews, “Now Staring on the Web: YouTube,” (April 9, 2006), http://www.wired.com/news/wireservice/0,70627- 0.html?tw=wn_culture_4. (August 1, 2006).

References:

Bogatan, Donna. “YouTube Now ‘Entertainment Destination’: Partners with NBC, Courts CBS,” ZD Net: Digital Micro-markets, http://blogs.zdnet.com/micro-markets/?p=238. (July 26, 2006).
Calacanis, Jason McCabe. “How YouTube Won: Great SEO + Stolen Content (or ‘the biggest hit and run in the history of the Internet’),” Calacanis.com Blog (May 11, 2006),
http://www.calacanis.com/2006/05/11 /how-youtube-won-greatseo- stolen-content-or-the-biggest-hit/. (August 6, 2006).
Dvorak, John. “Understanding Digg and its Utopian Idealism,” PCmag.com, (June 26, 2006), http://www.pcmag.com/ article2/0,1895,1981824,00.asp. (August 1, 2006).
Glaser, Mark. “NBC, YouTube Cross-Promotion off to Crass Start,” Mediashift, (June 29, 2006), http://www.pbs.org/ mediashift/2006/06/sleeping_with_the_enemynbc_you.html. (August 8, 2006).
Green, Heather. “Way Beyond Home Videos,” Business Week (April 10, 2006).
Heimlick,Russell, “How to Create Your Own YouTube Site,” Flash Insider: The Unofficial Flash Weblog (July 26, 2006), http://www. flashinsider.com/2006/07/26/how-to-create-your-own-youtubesite/. (July 29, 2006).
Hinchcliffe, Dion. “The Shift to Social Computing,” ZD Net. The Enterprise Web 2.0 Blog, (March 12, 2006), http://blogs.zdnet. com/Hinchcliffe/index.php?p=21. (August 4, 2006).
Lessig, Lawrence. “The Ethics of Web 2.0: YouTube vs. Flickr, Revver, Eyespot, blip.tv, and even Google,” Lessig Blog (October 20, 2006), http://www.lessig.org/blog/. (October 20, 2006).
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT, 2001.
Nelson NetRatings. “YouTube U.S. Web Traffic Grows 75% Week Over Week.” (July 21, 2006), http://www.netratings.com/pr/pr_ 060721_2.pdf. (November 2, 2006).
Novak, Marcos. “Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace.” In Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality, edited by Randall Parker and Ken Jordan. New York: W. W. Norton & Co, 2001.
Rosenbush, Steven. “Kazaa, Skype and Now the Venice Project,” Business Week Online, (July 24, 2006), http://www.businessweek. com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/jul2006/db20060724_713810. htm?chan=tc&campaign_id=rss_tech. (August 6, 2006).
Stevens, Chris. “Truth or Illusion: What’s Real on YouTube?” Cnet, (September 18, 2006), http://crave.cnet.co.uk/0,39029477 ,49283663,00.htm.Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of Crowds. New York: Doubleday, 2004.
Walker, James, and Douglas Ferguson. The Broadcast Television Industry. Boston: Allyn & Bacon, 1998.
Wikipedia entry, “Neistat Brothers,” page last modified October 19, 2006, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neistat_Brothers. (October 20, 2006).
Williams, Martyn. “YouTube Deletes 30,000 Files on Request by Japan,” ComputerWorld, (October 20, 2006), http://www. computerworld.com.au/index.php/id;1793634095. (October 20, 2006).
WiredNews, “Now Staring on the Web: YouTube,” (April 9, 2006), http://www.wired.com/news/wireservice/0,70627-0.html?tw=wn_ culture_4. (August 1, 2006).