How 20 Years of YouTube Has Shaped Us
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From KQED in San Francisco, I'm Ina Kim. Coming up on Forum, YouTube is marking 20 years. The site for step-by-step how-to guides, unboxing and reaction videos, and children's songs that get stuck in your head. Baby, it's your baby, shark-to-doodle-do.

YouTube is stronger than ever after two decades, now making its way from our computers and phones to our TV screens. We'll look at how a way to share videos fundamentally changed the way we consume and produce online content and shaped our culture. And we hear from you. How do you use YouTube? Join us.

Welcome to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. YouTube has come a long way since it was founded in 2005 as a way to share videos. Now the biggest video sharing platform in the world, YouTube is the second most visited website after Google, which owns it.

Billions of monthly users turn to the platform for how-to videos, crazy stunts, music and movie clips, kids entertainment, and more. Well, look at the growth of YouTube in the last two decades, the controversies it's weathered, where it's headed, and how it's changed us along the way. Share how you use YouTube by calling 866-733-6786, by emailing forum at kqed.org, or finding us on Blue Sky Facebook Instagram threads at kqedforum.com.

Joining me now is Mark Bergen, a reporter for Bloomberg News and author of Like, Comment, Subscribe, Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination. Mark, welcome to Forum. Thanks for having me. So before all this domination, who founded YouTube?

Sure. It was founded by a trio of guys who met at PayPal about 20 years ago. They were two engineers and one designer. And they were part of this moment in Silicon Valley, what we call now Web 2.0, where it was the just beginning of...

Using the internet, not just for... This was the first user-generated content. People were actually contributing to make the internet happen. Facebook had just started a year before. Flickr was taking off photo sharing. And there was this moment where everyone kind of thought that video was going to move online as well. But there weren't great video sharing websites. Yeah.

Yeah. So these guys, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Javed Kareem, they're not household names, right? They didn't really stay with the company or maybe one of them did.

They're not. By five years in, they had all left. In fact, Java had actually left before the sale to Google, which was under 18 months. I think part of that's personality. None of them sort of had the strong personality that we kind of associate with maybe like a Mark Zuckerberg, that founder type that's going to start this company and never let go.

And that's certainly been, I think, one of the major characteristics of YouTube, right? Its leadership is not as well known as Facebook and Twitter, which has certainly also been one of the major reasons why it's not talked about and criticized as often as those social media platforms. Because there isn't anyone specifically to point to. That's right. It's not really a face.

Yeah. David uploaded the very first, I guess, official video to YouTube. What was it about? It was about an elephant in a zoo. At the time, the founders, you know, this was they actually initially thought of the idea as a video dating website.

And the premise here was at the time, it's hard for us to imagine, but it was like people were thinking who's going to want to post videos online and who's going to want to watch amateurs, non-professionals, regular people's videos. And the only sort of logical explanation for that would be dating, be it for sex. It turns out that people have –

so many other reasons for watching video. But I think at the time, the founders of YouTube had no idea what they were building and how big it would be. Yeah. Producer Mark said an early viral hit was Numa Numa. What was that?

That's right. Some listeners may remember that one. Actually, that I think it went took off on another video sharing platform. And I read about this a little in the book and it was just this. It's a great video. People can go watch it still. It's a lip syncing video of this guy and is kind of familiar now to us. Just someone sitting with a web camera in their bedroom.

singing this song and it's not certainly not when you look at this this guy not the someone you'd expect him to do what he does which is just turn into this extremely emotional performance and it's just a it's still to this day it's incredibly joyful to watch and I think captures that that was part of the early reason for success was was this is clearly something that is

almost addictive and people want to keep coming back to. Yeah, it underscores why I guess ultimately a video sharing site would take off sort of the power of

video. And of course, Google saw that and acquired it for like more than a billion and a half dollars in 2006. You mentioned that it was a time when, you know, photo sharing was moving online, it felt like video was inevitable. What other external factors would you say really helped YouTube take off?

I think there were a couple others. One is that Chad Hurley was the first CEO and the designer, and I think had a pretty intuitive sense of what people will make it really easy for people to use. And that was sort of a guiding principle with something that, you know, a bit of cliche, but something that your mother or grandmother would be able to use.

Um, and that's still, if we, we go to the website today, 20 years later, there's that kind of iconic triangle button. It looks, it's pretty, um, simple to watch a video. It's pretty simple, relatively simple to upload the video. Um, and I think that was a major reason why it succeeded. Uh,

The second reason is they were, unlike companies like Google that had a competing service at the time, YouTube was much more willing to be a bit cavalier with copyright and piracy. And I think that played to their advantage where there were certain videos that seemed like they were kind of in this gray area around copyright. YouTube kept them up.

That ended up being the grounds for a pretty major lawsuit. But that was some of the videos actually that they kept up, it turns out, weren't violating copyright rules and became incredibly viral success. I think the third factor is just luck. Like that is something that happens for all these successful businesses.

It is just timing and circumstances. And they had enough connections in Silicon Valley to get a company like Google willing to pay at the time a very large sum for them. Yeah, we're talking about 20 years of YouTube and the growth and impact of the platform. You also say that something that YouTube did that

contributed to its success is that it paid people to make videos. So that was a really new thing at the time, Mark? That's right. I think there were a couple other sites at the time that were exploring this, but it was pretty novel. And it's still remarkable to this day that...

you know, there's obviously it's a very different world 20 years later and there's so many other competitors to YouTube, but no one else has, has really latched on this ability to pay out what we now call creators at the time. There's kind of YouTubers, broadcasters at such a scale as YouTube has. Originally they started with a much smaller number, a few dozen YouTubers. They thought they were kind of popular enough and responsible enough to

to start this revenue sharing and they split taking about 45% of every dollar that an advertiser spent on a video that would run kind of on the same page or later on like within a YouTube video and then YouTube took the remainder.

Sorry, they gave the remainder rather. YouTube took 45% and they gave the remainder to the creator, which was a major reason for their growth. You're going to have people that are now being able to build professions on YouTube and at least or strive to do so. And so that means they're going to keep posting videos.

Yeah. Listeners, how do you use YouTube? What kinds of content do you seek out? Do you remember the first video you watched on YouTube? Are you a creator? Do you create content for YouTube? Tell us about your experience on the platform. Noel on Discord writes, it's a good thing, but also some bad, as in people believing influencers who have charisma on YouTube versus believing experts. With digging, one could find videos of experts too, but then there's the algorithm that

I mean, Mark, we were talking about, or at least I was mentioning in the intro that it's really a behemoth, more than two and a half billion monthly users, the largest video sharing platform in the world, lots of delightful but also toxic content. And then Noelle is pointing out potentially misleading content by non-experts.

You said something interesting, which is that it has escaped the kind of scrutiny that Twitter and Facebook maybe have, in part because maybe they didn't have like a founder that you could really point your fingers at. But what are other reasons you think that it has escaped scrutiny, given the fact that, yeah, all of these things do exist on the site, the delightful and the problematic?

Yeah, I think it's a really good question. One of the major reasons is because for a lot of people, and I think this is a bit of a generalization, but certainly it's an age gap. Maybe there's like people maybe over 40. Those are people that are often, you know, newspaper editors or regulators or politicians. YouTube is used very differently than people under 40.

And for a lot of people, YouTube is used kind of like Google search. It's a utility. Like it's the first thing you go to if you need to learn how to fix your sink or to assemble a desk or...

Right. And we've all done this. Or you want to watch some sort of archival footage, like an old Stevie Wonder clip or something. It is there on YouTube that I know it will be there. And that's a very different way than someone who's 15 years old might use the platform. That's very different than someone who's five years old is going to use the platform.

I think that's a factor we know we see a lot of. There certainly are people, you might have friends, you might be a YouTube creator, but it's more likely that the successful YouTube videos are from people who are

pretty professional. They're kind of, um, what now have careers and some of them have followings and fame on par with Hollywood a listers. When you go on Facebook, you're probably going to see a mixture of influencers and your uncle posting. Um, and so I think that sort of virality is a different beast. Um, I also think Google, which owns YouTube has been a little savvier at times at staying out of the limelight. Um,

And Google has its share of major problems as well. And YouTube being a smaller part of the company, I think actually plays to its kind of advantages there. Yeah. Real quick, what do 15 year olds tend to turn to YouTube for the most? Do you think what are they seeking out?

I mean, I think it still works as a really effective way if you ask someone if they're familiar with Mr. Beast. I think that's a generational question, right? I would say anyone maybe under 25 is going to know who Mr. Beast is.

And maybe over 25 is not or not be that familiar with him. He's the world's biggest YouTuber and has been for several years and has an audience and cachet, I think, almost certainly on par, if not larger than a lot of TV shows right now. Yeah. And then, you know, my kids, it's amazing the number of like,

Adults they watch playing with toys Yeah, I mean my the book spends a lot of time on that I think it's super fascinating and under discussed that YouTube is the world's biggest children's entertainment platform and Sort of became so accidentally. I mean when the founder started off 20 years ago They were very intentional that this was for for legal reasons had to be a site for 13 and up and then you saw this

this onslaught about starting maybe in 2010 of children's videos come on the platform. And in part, a really popular format was playing with toys. Yeah. Well, what started out as a simple video sharing site evolved to become an indispensable part of our lives and the most visited website after Google's own homepage. We're talking about YouTube and we'll have more about it after the break. Stay with us. I'm Mina Kim. ♪

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I'm making muffins as best as I can. I like turtles. Porkchop sandwiches. There's so much you could do anything. We're talking about YouTube, which started 20 years ago and has evolved into the biggest video sharing platform and most popular streaming app ever.

We're taking a look at the impact YouTube has had with you, our listeners, and with Mark Bergen, a reporter for Bloomberg News, whose book is Like, Comment, Subscribe, Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination. How do you use YouTube? What do you remember about the first viral video you watched or a video that you will always remember? Do you create content for YouTube? Tell us about that experience. Are your children obsessed with it?

The email address, forum at kqed.org. Our social channels are at KQED Forum, and you can call us at 866-733-6786, 866-733-6786. And Bruce writes, the first YouTube video I saw was Leonard Nimoy singing The Ballad of Bilbo Baggins, a 1967 music video from a variety show.

It was at a friend's house, and I remember the player had a vintage-style TV and the video played on. It was a hilarious way to be introduced to the website. Well, just before the break, we were talking about how YouTube has been able to create livelihoods for creators. And I want to meet one of the full-time creators that's on YouTube today.

Johnny Cole Dixon hosts No Lab Coat Required and joins us now. Johnny, thanks so much for being with us. Thank you for having me. Nice to meet you, Mina. Yeah, same here. So tell me what No Lab Coat Required is about. No Lab Coat Required is the bridge between the world of academia and the public. So we like to serve as an education platform first. And I primarily talk about things. Well, it started with me talking about things that I was

very passionate about, which was health and nutrition and things along those lines. So I started producing content for it and it grew into where we are now. So it kind of started as a passion project and now it's grown into something even bigger than just myself. Yeah. What are some of the latest topics you've covered?

We really get into it. So right now I'm exploring culturally relevant, more top of mind things that are going on in the news. For example, like bird flu is a really big topic right now. So our most recent video can actually go watch. We went out to a farm and we

just talk to a farmer about it. Like what's going on? So right now we're taking more of a, exploring a lane of journalism and a lot of people love it when we talk about nutrition as well. The biggest video we have is about the, basically the misconceptions of butter and how it kind of came to be this really controversial food item that

and the story of how that came to be. But what's interesting about us is that we really break down and disseminate the science. So you don't really get like strict journalism from us. We're going to probably talk about anatomy and physiology, and you're going to walk away understanding your body in a way that you never really thought of before. And that's where I find the fun in it. You say us, so how big is your team and how long does it take you to make one of these? Oh, goodness, us. So yes, there's 10 of us.

Three of us are on a volunteer basis because we're actually incorporated as a nonprofit. So hear me out because it's a bit of a thing. We just incorporated this last August. So this is all brand new to me. Having a team, managing a team, and creating as a team is brand new to me. But there's 10 of us outside of the three volunteers who are on the board. Shout out KB, Nicole, and Naomi. Everyone else is an editor or probably helping me distribute or write in some way.

So why focus on YouTube over other platforms? So the thing is, if you were to ask that question to anyone that's on an other platform other than YouTube, they're going to tell you that they want to be on YouTube. YouTube has kind of established itself as the juggernaut of the creator economy, which is honestly a new word. But this is an evolving and growing thing that we have to now consider there's

A lot of money that goes through. There are partnerships and brand deals and media companies, and it's all relatively new. And we find YouTube kind of being the end goal. It's where you can really establish yourself as a robust creator or someone that has a robust media company. Yeah. Well, let me go to caller Scott in Martinez who might have a question you could answer. Scott, you're on.

Yeah, hey, thanks. Yeah, real quick, I taught myself how to play guitar at the ripe old age of 52 and somehow ended up with a channel with like 700 videos and 600 subs since then. And I thought that I had either read somewhere or saw in a chat that once I had 3,000 hours and 500 subs...

And if they attached an ad to my video that I would get paid in some way. Now, I'm not like I don't care about getting paid, but I just heard about that. And I'm wondering if anyone knows like about that. How do I get paid? I'm sure you know this well, Johnny, in terms of what is required for monetization.

Yes, absolutely. So there's a threshold you have to reach. I believe it's 4,000 watch hours unless some things have changed. 4,000 watch hours and then there's another piece that couples with that threshold that you have to reach. And you can actually, for you, you can go into your analytics and you can see it on the back end. If you download the YouTube Studio app, YouTube will give you a progress bar of how close or far you actually are from reaching that. But yeah, it's 4,000 watch hours within a certain amount of time. Yeah.

And what was it like for you or did you like really watch and monitor views, subscriptions and so on? I'm just curious what that feeling was like when you saw that climb so high in your case. Yeah, it's it's it's.

So to answer your question straight up, the short answer, it's a bit of euphoria. And it's part of the problem with virality. So I went from basically zero to 100 really quick because I started, again, as a passion project, I...

wasn't even on YouTube at first. I was making videos on Instagram, so that's where it started, but that was on IGTV. IGTV died out. A little birdie said, "You should be making videos on YouTube." I started doing that and just kind of just threw them to the wall to see what stick. And then I got really good at editing and I got really good with kind of speaking on camera. And then I put out a video and it was actually the butter video. It was the butter video that actually platformed No Lab Court Required to where we are now.

And that video brought me from zero to in the partner program. I had reached the 4,000 watch hours and I was in my kitchen when I got the email notification from Google that I was in the partner program and it brought me to tears. So it's a bit of a euphoria, but you don't want to chase it. That's where you get in trouble.

What do you mean by you don't want to chase it, that's where you get in trouble? - Well, you want to keep, you got to know your why, right? I'm a teacher at heart. So for me, I know why I'm doing this.

But you get these channels sometimes that lack the substance and the heart behind it because it's just people chasing that creator economy that I talked about. You get the badges. You get the nice YouTube. You get the check marks for verified. And it's just like it could really turn into a celebrity culture. And that can do something for your content. It turns your content into a shell of what it actually could be if you had your heart in it, you know?

Do you ever worry about the fact that creators really have no control over YouTube's algorithm or how your videos get suggested to people?

Oh, gosh. How much time you got? Yeah, it's the number one plight of being a full-time creator is that we don't know the size of the next check that'll come in. We don't know what updates the algorithm is going to have. And we don't know what's going to be popular. We can't tell the future. And it's interestingly, I was just having this conversation with a friend of mine. It almost seems as if the people always end up choosing what's going to be popular, but

And the algorithm just kind of allows for that. It's something that you're really thankful for the algorithm, but you also understand it's a double-edged sword because it is something you have to play into. Everything you do,

on the top of your mind you're going to have will people click on this and sometimes that can just it's not the most fun thing to draw uh to drive your decisions based on what are people going to view right so sometimes you want to have a little bit more like just you just kind of want to go with the flow of it but that's not the job unfortunately well johnny congrats on making it a full-time thing for you and really appreciate you coming on to share your experience absolutely

Absolute pleasure, Amina. Thank you. Thank you. Johnny Cole Dixon is a video creator and host. His channel is NoLabCoatRequired, and it's on YouTube. And we're talking about YouTube with you, our listeners, sharing how you use it and your memories of it. This listener writes, I remember we used to listen to the shoes video by Kelly, Liam Kyle Sullivan. It was a rage, and everyone was obsessed with that when I was in the sixth grade decades ago.

Mark, listening to Johnny talk about, you know, just the plight of the creator not really knowing how things are going to shift. You write about how YouTube has never really been transparent about its algorithm and that its algorithm was never neutral. What do you mean by that?

Yeah. I thought, I mean, I thought Johnny did an amazing job of, of sort of talking about that experience and, um, that opacity and never really knowing that like sort of guaranteed check or how much it's going to be. Um, I, I,

I think YouTube will say that part of the reason they keep a lot of secrecy around the algorithm is because they have this sort of perpetual cat and mouse game around everything from sort of scammers to, I guess, what we call clickbait, people that are sort of abuse the system. And this was a big major problem for them about a decade or so ago of people that would

We've all probably stumbled upon this at times, like a video that says one thing and it doesn't deliver it. What the thumbnail promise that the title promises is,

Right. And I think, you know, part of this, they've actually gone more lengths recently to try to explain how this works. But this is an ever evolving thing. In recent years, they've felt this new competitive threat from TikTok. And so you probably have seen a lot more if you have used the YouTube app, a lot more YouTube shorts, which are kind of their TikTok app.

rival service. And that's changed. That's certainly a different way of measuring and that's sort of prioritizing what kind of videos are fed to you. There's a very different kind of use swiping through with your thumb is a much more different experience than watching like a 20 minute video. And so the algorithm sort of is always changing.

And I think the neutrality point is something I talk about a lot in the book is the company goes to great lengths to sort of present itself as this objective platform. And they talk a lot about the difference with traditional media where you had TV producers or Hollywood executives that were the gatekeepers.

to this world, right? And you couldn't get on TV, you couldn't get in movies unless you got through these gatekeepers. And the beauty of YouTube is that doesn't exist. There's no one kind of programming online. There's no one telling you what, with a few exceptions, really what you can and cannot post, when you can post.

And there's many examples of people who just started posting videos online and it kind of became almost overnight success. But at the same time, you know, the company's clearly, for a variety of reasons, wants to steer in certain directions. They are an advertising business and they always want things to be advertising friendly. And so they do kind of put their thumb on the scale in many ways and have over the last 20 years. Nice.

Another listener on Discord writes for me, whenever I hear a new song that I like or even music I like, I will ultimately end up on YouTube playing some video of that music. Let me go to Carl in Marin. Hi, Carl, you're on.

Oh, yeah. So for me, as a young parent, I had one of my kids had learning differences. And so as a way to help them, I was able to find videos that could visually show them, you know, sort of give them a preamble to what they were going to be reading about or learning. And as a parent with a kid with learning differences, it was a godsend because I could always sift through and find

It would help attach meaning to what my child was reading. Yeah. Gosh, I love how that was so successful for you, Carl. Thanks for sharing that. And I can hear how that that would be. Let me go to Rick in Sacramento next. Hi, Rick, you're on.

All right. Thank you. What I'd like to say, the first thing is there's nothing that will happen in your life that hasn't already happened to somebody else. And they put the solution on YouTube. And the other thing is, of all the misinformation in some of those malinformative videos, get tens of millions of hits. Who gets the money from that? So do people get paid? Do they get demonetized if they're doing misinfo or disinfo? Really? I think Rick might be worried about their mark.

Yeah, that's a really great question. I mean, I think, um, the pandemic was a major inflection point for, for YouTube. Um, I would say before then they certainly had a relatively hands-off approach. Um, there were certain, there's certain video topics where from early on, you know, they're going to kind of rule things out. Um, they, they've always been sort of, uh,

a pretty hard line on sex and graphic sex and nudity with some exceptions for I'd say like popular music videos actually but and there have been hate speech or something they've ruled out but you know the company that is something that the

These are not objective things necessarily. These are really subjective and very difficult. And we have to remind ourselves that YouTube is incredibly global and operates in almost every country outside of China and hundreds of languages and

just doesn't have the resources, the way the company is structured to police that all the time and to be able to decipher that. So to answer your question, you know, something that happened around COVID and certainly around health, the company became much more aggressive about what was deemed health information and videos about COVID

the COVID-19 as well as the vaccines, they both kind of demonetized and were much more cautious about sharing revenue with video broadcasters and started to remove a lot more videos than they had before. And that caused quite a lot of controversy. And a lot of video creators, I think, were caught up in that and argued that what they were producing is not misinformation. They shouldn't have been taken down or shouldn't have been punished.

Yeah, actually, it's interesting. This listener has a related point. They write, I noticed a trend when having conversations about COVID and vaccinations with people who became skeptics about vaccines or masking or even shared outright conspiracies. I would share a print article, a radio story, and they would share a YouTube video. This was across race, class, politics, and gender. I started to realize we were talking past each other because of the medium. I adjusted and searched for video content to send them.

Yeah, I'm wondering, is it all basically AI now that scrubs for things that YouTube finds, I guess, something that they would need to flag, finds disinformation, finds as disinformation or reprehensible and so on? Or do they still use a lot of human reviewers?

So I think they certainly use a combination of a lot of machine learning systems to kind of flag videos. And then they have a system, a team of across the globe of human reviewers. Many of them, I'll be clear, are contract employees that don't actually work directly for the company. You know, one thing to keep in mind with YouTube is it's owned by Google and Google's a search engine primarily. And so they think about these problems as,

as like a search company. And let me unpack that a bit. Like the health example, what they've often want to do is not necessarily remove videos

that might be misinformation or might be misleading people, but they want to promote the... Their first tactic was to try to promote videos from the World Age Health Organization, from local hospitals, from local governments or officials or some... Or these kind of certified doctors. There are a lot of doctors on YouTube that are promoting videos.

And so their tactic was to try to promote them higher in the algorithm. And so when people search for something, they'll be more likely to find them. I think one of the problems and that listener had a really good point is that there's a lot of incentives. If someone feels really passionate, say that vaccines are causing harm.

they're probably going to post something online and they might even make a long YouTube or many YouTube videos about it. And YouTube's had a hard time, say, getting the World Health Organization or doctors or hospitals to rebut that by posting their own videos, right?

I think that's something the company's been trying, and I actually don't know how well they effort. But I think they really try to approach this like Google would, where if you click on something in your Google results, you're going to see, certainly around health, you see certain certified health organizations at the top of results, and YouTube's trying to take the same approach.

We're looking at 20 years of U2. The platform turns 20 this year. And besides step-by-step how-to guides, unboxing and reaction videos, kids' songs, and so on, it's also a place where more and more adults are getting their news. Just this year, the platform is talking about how its viewership is happening more on television sets. We're looking at how all that growth has shaped us with Mark Bergen and with you. Stay with us. This is Forum.

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You don't wake up dreaming of McDonald's fries. You wake up dreaming of McDonald's hash browns. McDonald's breakfast comes first. Welcome back to Forum. I'm Mina Kim. We're talking about the impact that YouTube has had on us in just two decades with Mark Bergen, a reporter for Bloomberg News and author of Like, Comment, Subscribe. Earlier, we were joined by video creator Johnny Cole Dixon of NoLab.com.

coat required. And you, our listeners are sharing how you feel like YouTube has changed us as well as the types of things that you seek out on YouTube and the questions you have about how this behemoth of a company, uh,

Nancy on Discord writes...

Growing up, I often didn't see people who look like me in traditional media, but YouTube was where I felt seen and connected to the online Asian American community. I think it's incredible how the community found on YouTube has powered the momentum for Asian American representation in modern media that transcends beyond stereotypical portrayals. We've got another creator on with us now, Victor Hsieh, video creator for his channel, Did You Eat Yet? Victor, thanks so much for being with us.

Thanks for having me. So what is Did You Eat Yet all about? It is a video series on YouTube focusing on topics that I believe deserve more love and exposure around the area, around the food, and just kind of my personal experiences growing up as a first-generation Asian American in the Bay Area and some of the experiences I've had with that.

So you highlight sort of Bay Area chefs and also restaurants? Yeah, it kind of started off kind of highlighting mostly Oakland. You know, all the legacy restaurants I grew up with.

talking about the stories I had, my family had behind them. And as I've been working on the series more throughout the last year, started to just include a lot more storytelling from the people behind the food as well. People from certain neighborhoods, people who are doing certain things with food. So yeah, just been able to highlight a lot of small businesses in the Bay Area,

mostly Oakland, but across the East Bay as well. And yeah, just been able to cover a lot of different various neighborhoods. Like I just did a video highlighting like West Oakland and another one around kind of how Texas barbecue has kind of been taking over the Bay area as well with certain restaurants like Fix Q. And one of my friends that runs a truck called Pico's barbecue, for example, who have,

uh, really also just learned a lot of stuff on YouTube as well, right. Before even traveling to Texas to really hone their craft and bringing it back here in the Bay. So Victor, what's the goal for you? Is it to, to make a living doing this? No, it, it, I have a full-time job. Actually, this was always just a side project. I've always been a creative, um,

And this was just something I kind of just started doing like about two years ago, started planning for at least. Yeah. I just wanted to have a little side project and it just became this thing. I don't know if I have an end goal. I just like to create stuff. I'm telling stories that I think need to be told, but no real end goal. I just kind of like do what, what inspires me, what motivates me at that moment in time.

Yeah. Yeah. And I understand you're not actively looking for sponsorships or restaurants to pay you. You don't charge for anything, right, to do this? No. I just feel like there are certain topics that need to be talked about. And I'll reach out to certain restaurants. I'll reach out to certain people to see if they want to be included. Like, for example, I did a really...

I think a really interesting video about the Filipino American experience in the Bay Area recently as well. Got a ton of really cool people in that one. But yeah, I never actively look for sponsorships. I'm never asking for anyone to pay me for these things. I just make these videos because I feel like they deserve to be made to cover these people's stories. But yeah.

Well, so it's for the love of storytelling, it sounds like. It really is. Yeah. I feel like there's a lot of interesting stories to be told just about different groups of people in the Bay Area. Yeah. And, you know, I'm not saying I have the biggest platform or anything like that. I'm not saying I'm a great storyteller or anything like that. But for what I like to do, I think it's interesting enough to put out, I guess.

Victor Shea, video creator. His channel is Did You Eat Yet? Thanks so much for talking with us. Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me. So, Mark, you know, there was this piece in The Atlantic from the University of Massachusetts researcher that just talks about the vast amount of content on YouTube that has nothing to do with food.

profit or ads or that we're even likely to see things like church services, condo board meetings, you know, a city council meeting and, and so on. How much of that content do you think makes up YouTube? You know, it's incredible library of, of content proportion, proportionally to the kind of the things that we all talk about, right, which is the viral videos, the big personalities and so on.

Yeah, that's a really good question. I don't know the exact number. I'm sure that I don't think Google is super inclined to tell anyone. But I imagine it's a very big, big chunk of it. I mean, there's a really one of my favorite anecdotes in the book was someone told me inside YouTube, they discovered that, you know, companies that were, say, running a convenience store were just uploading their hours of security camera footage onto YouTube and putting in, you can kind of mark videos as private footage.

on YouTube as well. And so, you know, just as like basically free servers, storage space. And I think YouTube eventually stopped them from doing that. But this is, yeah, it's become during the pandemic, right? It became this, this place where people could watch videos

watch the local city council meetings, right? It became kind of a, in many ways, like a town square for governance. And for a long time, it's become this really vital place, I think, for democracy and politics. And I don't think we fully appreciated that. And some of that is

And there's also lots of creators on there who will, you know, it is sort of like professional sports where you're going to have, it's very top heavy. The well-known stars are making a lot of the money and they're this very long tail of creators in these niches that are sort of struggling to get by or might not be able to do it full time.

Yeah, the article went on to sort of describe what you were saying as infrastructure, meaning that the word platform is almost inadequate to describe what YouTube is because people do organize their lives around it. And so it sounds like you would, would you agree with that characterization? I think that's right. I mean, I think, you know,

Google tends to avoid that in some ways because it seems like we tend to regulate our infrastructure. Yes, exactly. That's what I was thinking. But it is. I think it's become that critical, very critical to a lot of regular functions. And I think it's sort of the same way that Google search is a utility for a lot of people. I think YouTube serves that same function. Let me go to caller Janae in Sunnyvale. Hi, Janae. You're on.

Hi. Hi. How are you guys doing? Well... Thanks for taking my call. I... YouTube changed my life during the pandemic. You know, I was always watching it, but not that much. And during the pandemic...

I'm retired, and I'm kind of a part-time artist. So I went on and started to watch all these amazing women and some men who were painting furniture, furniture that was just going to be thrown out or that people didn't love anymore. And they painted art on it. And I just watched hours and hours, bought the paint, and I started to do that. Now I flip a few pieces, you know, here and there.

I love watching it for whenever I need to do repairs around the house or if I need to learn something about a product, you know, before I purchase it. It's often good to see all the different kinds of reviews. And I also like the short commercials. They're just seconds long and you can skip them. I like that. So that's kind of my go-to in the evening. Yeah. And I appreciate that I can pick and choose.

Well, thanks, Janai, for sharing that. The Sussner appreciates it, too. They write, YouTube is certainly a lot of good and a lot of bad. For me, YouTube has been better than Wikipedia at learning stuff. I have learned so much on so many topics, and it continues to blow my mind that it is free. You just got to click on and subscribe to the right stuff. The recommendations keep getting better.

Another listener on Discord writes, I use YouTube the same way I approach any addictive substance, and I use those examples to guide my kids in their choices. There's a lot of beneficial content on YouTube, but I really wish it had finer filter controls for my kids and for me. Sue writes, my husband has been doing community videos since he started taping gun high school football games in 1991. Lots of school plays, other high school sports, interviews with local people, mostly shown on the local cable media outlet in Palo Alto.

Once YouTube started, he could post his videos there and share them more widely. He's now working on converting the boxes of VHS tapes in the garage to YouTube. He's over 400 items. Nothing is viral, but he's happy that they are preserved. He recently had our grandchildren interview me about my life and post it to YouTube so the rest of the family could see.

Mark, YouTube is like, its revenue, I understand, has quadrupled in the last decade or so. Do you know, you know what, I guess it's estimated because it really doesn't share data about its revenue in terms of, you know, what it is at right now?

They do share top line sales data from their advertising side. And I actually don't have that right in front of me, but I know it's in the tens of billions, I think, per year. I mean, it's certainly like it has gone up significantly from a time. There were still questions a decade ago if this could be a successful business. They clearly demonstrate that it is.

Um, what they haven't, they haven't necessarily break. They've shared some figures on, you know, YouTube also has a premium service. People can pay to subscribe, uh, to their music service, kind of like Spotify or a service like Netflix. Um, and I think that they've shared some numbers on that and that's still, still way behind, uh, as far as something like they're not kind of competing with the Netflix and, um, Spotify is in that category for paid, but they are the dominant player in sort of free, um, ad supported, uh,

online video. And as you mentioned earlier, they're have this tremendous growth in TV screens and a lot of people are now watching YouTube on their TVs. The listener that called in about the short kind of skippable ads, that was actually a pivotal moment for the company when they kind of invented that format. And ever since then, that was when their advertising business really took off.

So when you say that they're going on a TV screen, just basically the YouTube app on the screen or mirroring from your phone or those kinds of things and that people are wanting to watch these videos on a bigger TV screen. That's right. There's a couple that there's sort of YouTube TV, which is there sort of it's like a kind of over the top. That's a package like one of the many kind of cable alternatives where you can buy or something. Yeah, correct. Yeah. And you get a package of channels that come with that. And

Uh, and then there's just YouTube on your TV. Uh, and so anyone who has a smart television probably has the YouTube app on there. Um, and I mean, my, our household watches a lot of YouTube, uh, uh, in the evening, right? It's, um, it's pretty like, it's, it's pretty addictive. It's, it's, there's a lot of channels that I love to watch, you know, um, the example, I now live in London. So I slept through the Superbowl halftime show, but like the next day I knew it was going to be on YouTube, um,

And easy to watch. And that's something that really we take advantage of because two decades ago that didn't exist. Yeah. The other thing that I hear has grown a lot are podcasts on YouTube. So this audio only medium has now become something that people want to listen to on YouTube and watch a video of the podcaster.

I mean, that's been growing for a while. I think the company's really leaned into that. Part of that is just Google for a while tried to have its own kind of competing podcasting service and they decided that YouTube is where it's going anyway. And so they put all the resources behind that.

This is something where for this is great for for YouTube, right? Like think about, you know, I'm there many professional podcasters that do lots of work and not no disrespect for that. But there's also there is a format where it lends itself to many hours of footage. It can you know, people can kind of it doesn't require as much heavy editing as making a short film or animation, right?

And it is something where YouTube's algorithm, there's still the primary thing it's trying to achieve is getting what they call watch time, which is getting people to engage and basically watch videos longer. And podcasts are just gold for that. And so they're one of the formats. Beauty vlogs is another one. Video gameplay. These are these new categories that YouTube sort of invented and have become dominant parts of our culture. Let me remind listeners, you're listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

Let me go to Erica in Elk Grove. Hi, Erica. You're on. Hi, good morning. Thanks for having my call. Well, I have a love and hate relationship with YouTube. I have an eight-year-old that loves to be on YouTube, but I don't let him do it because I feel like the part of the shorts that comes with these very quick videos, my parental control is not working on that. So even though I have all the parental control on his videos,

iPad on the TV on my phone, because I have to have everything on my account to make sure I can control that. But yeah, so yeah, I mean, good point, Erica. Yeah, I want to actually ask you, Mark, does YouTube not have the same sort of parental controls for shorts, because it's definitely a growth area for it?

Yeah, I mean, I think I would imagine the company says that they try to do that there. So what they've done, there's the separate and I'm not sure if you're talking about the YouTube app, the kids app, or just the YouTube app itself with the parental control controls. Yeah. And I know that they're so the kids app is where they really want people sort of under 13 to spend a lot of time that sort of they try to make this this like safe playground. And there have been some major issues they've had with kids.

Certainly, when it first launched 10 years ago, there were a lot of problems with parents saying, this was not appropriate material for my child. It's kind of seeped through the cracks because YouTube will moderate this a little more aggressively than regular YouTube.com, but it's still the same system. It is algorithmically sorted. There's just so much content. This is not something where there's someone screening every video beforehand. So they've invested a lot more on...

did what they call kind of child safety in part because this is the one area where they've actually had some regulation.

And with the FCC sued them around violating children's online privacy protection rules. And some of that is around the kind of commercials that they play. And some of this is an ongoing issue where these parental controls are not always laid out that clearly. And it's very, I mean, talk to a lot of parents. It's incredibly difficult, especially at the age of eight, right? Where you're the child is doesn't necessarily want to watch the kids stuff anymore and wants to move into more of the preteen environment.

And I think this is something where that is a problem that YouTube hasn't really solved and doesn't necessarily have a lot of incentives to solve. Ami writes, as a child of the 60s, I loved watching YouTube as a time machine to watch concerts of the music of my childhood and even earlier. My husband and I will sometimes spend a romantic evening watching a concert or a series of musical performances via YouTube on our television instead of a movie screen.

I'd sort of put this question to the audience, Mark, but I want to put it to you, too, as we're at the end of the hour, just in terms of how you think YouTube has changed us or the effect that it's had on our culture.

Yeah, I think, I mean, there was the example I brought up earlier about this expectation that things will be online and available for us, right? And on demand and having that, you know, that archival footage about watching old videos and that was really hard to find two decades ago. And now we sort of take it, we take it for granted. It's always there. I think that's fundamentally changed. It is, you know, a lot of listeners have talked about media and the news and

It has moved us from this world of within a few decades, you know, a handful of broadcast TV stations to some more cable stations now to just endless amounts of places for us to receive news. And it has kind of blown apart this idea that who is to be trusted online. YouTube is, you know, along with social media platforms have thrown out of the window and it made it really hard for us to establish trust online.

And I think it has also changed the way in which we kind of a lot of trust has been established through people like YouTube influencers and creators. And I think we're still kind of dealing with that ramification. Inside YouTube's chaotic rise to world domination is the subhead to Mark Perkins' book, Like, Comment, Subscribe of Bloomberg News. Thanks so much, Mark. And thank you to Mark Nieto as well for producing today's segment. Thank you, listeners. You've been listening to Forum. I'm Mina Kim.

Funds for the production of Forum are provided by the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, the Generosity Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

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