YouTubers E-Book

Chris Stokel-Walker

• Herausgeber: Canbury
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 327

Beschreibung

- Only in-depth independent book on YouTube - Gripping tech and business saga - Valuable insight for creators, media students and marketing professionals

Leseprobe

YouTubers

How YouTube shook up TV

and created a new generation of stars

Chris Stokel-Walker

Canbury Press

First published by Canbury Press 2019

This edition published 2019

Canbury Press

Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom

Cover: Rache Bowie

Printed and bound in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon

All rights reserved © Chris Stokel-Walker, 2019

The right of Chris Stokel-Walker to be identified as the author

of this work has been asserted in accordance with Section 77

of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

This is a work of non-fiction.

The events and experiences detailed herein are true and have been

faithfully rendered to the best of the author’s ability.

ISBN: Hardback: 978-1-912454-21-1

Ebook: 978-1-912454-24-2

Audiobook: 978-1-912454-23-5

PART I. POWER AND BEGINNINGS

1.Uploading: Casey Neistat and the power of YouTube

One spring afternoon Casey Neistat uploaded a video lasting five minutes and twenty-two seconds to YouTube. In the style of so many YouTubers, he looked straight into the camera and aired his opinion on a matter of importance. As the elder statesman on the platform, Neistat’s words carry weight. He can make or break products and careers — and this video was no different. Seconds after he uploaded his video to YouTube via his superfast broadband at his creative headquarters in New York, it was available worldwide to four billion people: everyone on Earth with an internet connection. Millions of Neistat’s subscribers instantly received a notification telling them that one of YouTube’s most influential stars was again speaking directly to them.

Across the world in apartment blocks, restaurants, bedrooms and bathrooms, phones pinged, buzzed and beeped. Hundreds of thousands of people instantly watched what Neistat had to say. Wearing dark glasses, his hair streaked blond, Neistat vented his frustration at the way the media was second-guessing the motivations of YouTubers; and he wanted to single out one journalist in particular. In the comments section underneath his video his fans began discussing the question he posed: did people post videos on YouTube for the fame and fortune — or just to express themselves?

YouTube is a kaleidoscope of visual and audio content that mimics the richness, quirkiness, beauty and madness of human life. Every day its users upload videos on everything from pop music to politics, fashion to plumbing, and cars to fishing. The topics are as diverse (and as random) as the world itself. Want to watch racing pigeons, cut a perfect bob, discuss Che Guevara, speak Mandarin, or play guitar? YouTube can offer that, instantly. Want to relax while seeing boiled sweets made the old-fashioned way? Load up Lofty Pursuits. Have a hankering to watch a man meticulously scratch away the foil on 200 lottery playing cards to see if he can win back his outlay? Type ‘moorsey scratchcards’ into your search bar and reap the rewards.

Whether giving sex advice, posting football clips or simply splicing together footage to create an action-packed vlog, video makers want to communicate with and be seen by YouTube’s 1.9 billion registered users. Some hope that, like Casey Neistat, they too will one day set off pings across the world. For a few, notifications mean that millions of fans are watching them and their view counters are whirring upwards, along with their bank balances. Elite influencers are creative and dynamic and get to do what they want all day long. Unsurprisingly, becoming a YouTuber is the job children most covet.

They understand the platform’s extraordinary growth. YouTube is expanding so fast that outsiders can’t accurately measure its size. An estimated 576,000 hours of video are added daily to YouTube – vastly more than the new releases on Netflix. In October, November and December 2018, Netflix added 781 hours of original content, while 53 million hours of footage likely went onto YouTube. It would take you 35 days to watch the new Netflix content non-stop. You’d still be watching the YouTube uploads in the year 8069.

YouTube’s rise has been swift. In little more than a decade, it has moved from an oddity broadcast on bulky grey computer monitors to mass media entertainment viewed on ultra-thin, wall-mounted 55-inch televisions. In the past five years, YouTube viewing has rocketed from 100 million hours a day to one billion hours a day. It’s by far the most-watched video service worldwide, seen by 69% of all internet users every month. It’s the internet’s second most visited site, behind only Google (whom we ask about life), but ahead of Facebook (with whom we share our lives).

We are addicted. YouTube is the first thing many of us wake up to on our mobile phone screens, and the last thing we watch at night before turning off the television. It’s what we watch when we’re bored in our lunch hour, when we hear about the latest gossip, or when we want to listen to the latest pop song (or want to know how to get rid of a wasps’ nest). In one month alone, November 2017, YouTube was watched by an estimated 91 million Americans and by 21 million people in Britain. Many of them watched for hour after hour. Shortly after 9pm on 1 March 2018, one of them was my friend, Simon Coward. He opened up Facebook Messenger and tapped out a message: ‘So you’ve just been mentioned by one of the biggest YouTubers there is.’

Though only 38, Casey Neistat is something of the grand old man of YouTube. He became a viral sensation in 2003 when he uncovered Apple’s attempts to keep people locked into buying its products by making batteries in its iPods irreplaceable – and quick to wear out. He parlayed that into making independent films and an eight-part television show for American cable network HBO. He joined YouTube in 2010 and is approached by its executives when they want to publicly admit to and atone for transgressions against the community. He has 10 million subscribers, but his power eclipses even that vast number.

Filmed at 368 Broadway in New York, the location of an independent co-working studio space for YouTubers he set up, Neistat’s video discussed a story I had written for Bloomberg explaining how 96% of those who upload to YouTube don’t make enough money from adverts alone to break through the US poverty line. As a tech writer fascinated by YouTube – its stars, its ecosystem, its finance, its everything – I wanted to let people know that YouTube is not quite the gold mine that some aspiring vloggers believe it to be. Neistat’s beef was that people didn’t just go on YouTube to make money – they did it because they wanted to create. And because Neistat is a good human being and acutely aware of the power he holds over his subscriber base he ended with the message: ‘Please do not send the author of this article any negativity.’

Some couldn’t resist. As I sat in my bedroom 3,332 miles away in Newcastle in Britain, a Canadian basketball coach, Allen Harrington, sent me a private tweet stating that I was a horrible person as well as a horrible reporter. A teenage girl called me a ‘pussy’ and said she was going to make a YouTube video about me. ‘Diss track with Rice comin soon,’ she wrote, referencing one of her favourites, YouTuber Brian ‘RiceGum’ Le. A third fan protested: ‘Your look on shit is complete crap. I could make a better counter-argument article.’ (He didn’t.)

In the end, two million people watched the video. I had learnt some home truths. Among them were just how fast and direct the connection between YouTubers and viewers is, how passionate those fans can be – and how a video can spread around the world in minutes.

YouTube is different to a conventional media company: its reach is wider, its diversity broader, its demographic younger, and its power stronger. All that has caught the attention of big business. Unsurprisingly for such a sweeping force, YouTube has transformed advertising. Corporations from big carmakers like Ford and Audi to toiletries giants like Procter & Gamble no longer have to display their message in the breaks during scheduled TV shows. They can speak personally to a specific audience, either directly through their own YouTube channel or through a creator who has a direct connection with their fans. Want to see a hands-on review of the latest iPhone model? You may have to head to YouTube. Apple has started entrusting the few review copies of its latest devices to YouTubers rather than traditional media. It’s a stark (and visual) demonstration of how significantly the balance of power has shifted from traditional broadcasters towards YouTube.

It is, in fact, a revolution. In the past, Hollywood studios, television networks and newspaper publishers were top-down, professionalised industries. ‘You were a consumer, not a producer, of content,’ points out communication academic Cynthia Meyers, of New York’s College of Mount Saint Vincent. No longer, she says:

‘Social media makes every single person that participates in it a content producer as well as consumer. Content flow is no longer coming out of TV networks: it’s coming out of users.’

Most incredibly, this fundamental change has slipped almost unnoticed and without oversight into our everyday lives. On the few occasions YouTube bursts onto the pages of newspapers, it’s in simplistic tones or wonder, with little understanding or analysis as to what its explosive growth means to our economy and to our lives. It’s written about primarily in the context of three things: its scandals, the wealth that youngsters have accrued in just a few years (more than most people make in a lifetime), and the impact of fake news, unsavoury content and children’s shows.

But YouTube is far more nuanced than media coverage suggests. It’s a multi-billion dollar industry that employs hundreds of thousands of talented people across the world. Many of them work at Google, which owns YouTube. Thousands more are employed in the booming associated industries that have sprung up to support these new celebrities. The super-charged growth of production companies, video editors and agents in this new age of individual video makers makes Hollywood’s early years seem like a cottage industry.

YouTube has a do-it-yourself ethic; it is punk TV for the 21st century. Opportunities for on-camera talent are democratic (pick up a camera and start talking) and still expanding. People are beginning to make serious money behind the scenes, too. It has created its own norms, businesses and subculture. In 2013, Companies House in the UK didn’t know anyone working as a ‘vlogger’, ‘YouTuber’ or ‘influencer’. Five years later, 74 entrepreneurs used those titles.

Make it big and you are made for life. Some YouTubers live in mansions funded by the merchandise they sell to fans. Jake Paul, PewDiePie and KSI are instantly recognisable names to young people – but not usually to their parents.

So, who are these stars? What kind of lives do they live? What do they want? What does their success mean for the future of the media, and for society?

What role does YouTube itself – which is seen by many as the future of entertainment – have in our daily lives? And what consequences does a self-regulating, private video marketplace have for the spread of extremism and for the creators themselves?

For the first time, this book looks independently at the rise of YouTube, the changes it has wrought to our viewing habits, and its rapidly evolving and growing ecosystem. It also looks at the personal stories – the successes and failures – of some of YouTube’s biggest creators, both those on the way up and those on the way down. It investigates the pretenders, the also-rans, and the platforms that were YouTube before YouTube existed.

It’s the story of YouTube and YouTubers. It explains how one company’s algorithm is powering the world, and how teenagers who have just left school are able to make more money than modern-day industrialists. It is stranger than fiction, and like the best stories, is filled with human drama. Welcome to the amazing, dynamic, controversial, odd – and dazzlingly popular – world of YouTube.

2. Jake Paul: cars, money and a burning swimming pool

Make your way the 100 metres or so up the gated driveway of a mountainside home in California and your eye is drawn to the rust-coloured statue in the middle of the front yard. Cast in metal, a stick man holds up four large boxes that appear to be toppling out of reach. Look left and you’ll see a newly installed skate ramp on the front lawn. To the right of that you’ll see the dirt ramp where the owner jumps his luxury cars, among them a Lamborghini Huracán Performante, a Tesla Model X P-100 D (nicknamed Bloodshark), and a tie-dyed Ford Focus RS called Rainbro.

But don’t get distracted by the flashy motors and the general hullabaloo taking place in the grounds of this three-and-a-half acre property. Otherwise you’ll miss the 15,000-square-foot, eight-bedroom mansion, which has a custom-designed fish tank in the master bedroom and a ‘merchandise shop’ (which the public can’t visit) showcasing a custom line of T-shirts, hoodies and sweatshirts.

The owner of this $6.9 million mansion is a high school dropout with a short attention span. A decade ago Jake Paul might have been consigned to a low-wage future scanning groceries in a supermarket in his native Ohio. Instead he is the modern face of YouTube; a boisterous millionaire with a frenetic lifestyle and a booming business. His story shows how YouTube is throwing jokers into the pack of modern media.

In 2014, Paul left school and the family home in Westlake, Ohio, aged 17, for the West Coast to upload videos to the internet. An early fan of sketch comedy channel Smosh (Paul and his older brother’s first joint YouTube channel on the platform was called Zoosh, inspired by the Smosh name), he first came to real fame by doing jokey videos on Vine, the six-second social media video sharing app bought by Twitter. He bounded onto YouTube when Vine closed in late 2016. ‘I was a savage from day one,’ he boasted in a video hyping his YouTube channel.

Certainly, he was too savage for some neighbours of the $17,000-a-month home he was renting in Beverly Grove, California. For one 15-minute video, uploaded in July 2017, Paul decided to drive around in his newly souped-up truck, honking his extra-loud horn at passersby. One shopper, Ellis Barbacoff, later sued Paul, claiming that ‘sustained shock and injuries to his body’ had caused longstanding ‘pain and suffering’ and ‘emotional distress’. (When this book went to press, the case was ongoing.) His neighbours threatened a class action lawsuit against him because of his outlandish behaviour – which included setting fire to his own swimming pool. You might wonder how someone would set fire to a swimming pool. The answer is: you throw a load of furniture into the empty pool, toss some lighter fluid over it, then set fire to it. If you have to ask why, then you don’t understand Jake Paul.

His YouTube persona is the annoying, puckish person we all know and hate, with a whiny voice, attention-seeking attitude, bleached blond hair and gnat-like attention span – a Jedward for the online generation. This is how he introduces his YouTube channel:

WHATS UP?! Im Jake Paul.

Im 21, live in Los Angeles, & have a crazy life! Keep up :)

The squad ‘Team 10’ & I are always making comedy vids, acting, doing action sports, & going on crazy adventures.

Subscribe & watch daily to keep up with the madness

Paul is also – alongside his brother Logan, who is best known for uploading a video of a dead body hanging in a forest in Japan – one of the most successful YouTubers, with 17 million subscribers. He has interviewed a United States senator about gun control. He’s been invited to – and illicitly stayed overnight in – the White House (the unexpected sleepover was a dare for a video, of course). He owns two absurdly expensive Audemars Piguet Swiss watches. He is estimated to earn anything between £250,000 ($350,000) and £4 million ($5.6 million) per year from advertising on his YouTube videos alone. He has done more with his life than many 52-year-olds, let alone other 22-year-olds from Ohio.

In many ways, Paul is the most successful postmodern YouTuber, transparent about the transactional nature of the relationship between him and his fans. He is clear that the reason why he’s quite so annoying is that he knows it will gain him notoriety, and consequently lucrative views. He finally moved out of Beverly Grove in October 2017, not because of the fires or the car horns or the savage behaviour, but on a technicality. He was banned from filming in the building without a shooting permit – preventing him from legally creating content without risking a six-month jail sentence.

Paul now lives in the mansion in Calabasas with members of Team 10, a ragtag gang of fellow YouTubers, all of whom are believed to have signed contracts giving him a cut of their earnings from the video sharing website. He is backed by a crew of agents, runners, producers, and general hangers-on, focused on the bottom line and squeezing out every penny from his often young fans.

His constantly shifting Team 10 can range in number from a handful to a dozen – including a toddler called Mini Jake Paul – depending on who’s in town and happy to hang out at his McMansion. All of them know that the quid pro quo for living in his orbit and enjoying the lifestyle is the requirement that they appear in his videos, shot by a cameraman trailing him at every moment and often edited while he sleeps by a British-based video editor, Jack Bell. (Paul’s team declined a request to speak to Bell about his life as the person responsible for Jake Paul’s inimitable video style.)

Regardless of who the supporting cast members are, his videos have a common theme: chaos. Like many lifestyle vloggers, Paul goes about his life – which just so happens to be wild and wacky – and brings along the viewers for a ride. Sometimes he plays pranks on his friends within his mansion; other times he sets fire to things because he is bored. He has made a habit of taking his colourful cars for a spin to visit the nearest supermarket, where he wanders the aisles picking up supplies for his next stunt. The result is like a scene from Who Framed Roger Rabbit?: the cartoon character, dressed head to toe in his own merchandise, or ‘merch’, stands out like a sore thumb, looking askance at packets of crisps and posters.

For all the antics, viewers are not in any doubt that Paul is running a business as well as living a lifestyle. Spend some time watching the videos he or his older brother Logan produce, and you’ll find that they are driven by a messianic urge to make you buy their merch, including $42 shorts, and a windbreaker that costs $90. For this book I analysed 50 videos uploaded by Jake and Logan Paul in February and March 2018 – more than six hours of content – to see how often they mentioned their merchandise. On average, it was once every 142 seconds.

Nowhere is this desire to upsell you on… well, anything, more obvious than in Jake Paul’s 2017 Christmas album. Litmas, the main track on the 18-minute album, is a vapid two-minute song with an industrial-sounding melody and a chorus that repeats the lines ‘Christmas is lit/Christ-mas, lit-mas’. Even in a genre famous for its bad music, the Christmas single is a new low (comments on the video included ‘This is easily the worst chorus to any song I have ever heard in my life’). No matter. Less than 24 hours after its release, it had been seen 2.4 million times.

A better glimpse into how modern-day YouTube works is Fanjoy to the World – a two-minute 16-second version of the Christmas classic Joy to the World with reworked lyrics. It starts by repeating ‘Buy dat merch’ seven times, adding: ‘All I want for Christmas is that Jake Paul merch/All I want for Christmas is a Jake Paul shirt’. Later, Paul manages to incorporate the URL to his online merchandise store in the song, and tells the listener: ‘Get in while you can/Before I sell it all’ and ‘Go tell your momma/She gotta buy it all’.

His approach is working. In 2018, Paul was the second highest-earning YouTuber, pulling in $21.5 million before management fees and taxes, according to Forbes. (The highest earning, who we’ll meet later, was even younger. No, it’s not Mini Jake Paul.)

Unsurprisingly, there are thousands of smaller scale Jake Pauls on YouTube, hoping to ape his success. Some of them even forked out $64 to learn more about Paul’s business model through a dubious online course he set up called Edfluence.

How did Jake Paul happen? How did YouTube become a site where people create entire conceits so that they can pepper their videos with calls to buy their merchandise every two minutes? Where individual vloggers can command global audiences of millions and live in mansions, surrounded by sports cars and hangers-on? How did YouTubers start living the life which school children most want to lead?

Every story needs to start somewhere – and fittingly for YouTube, which can often seem like a madhouse full of party animals, it started in a zoo.

3. Me At the Zoo: Jawed Karim and the worst video of all time

Meat the zoo is one of the most banal videos ever made. Even by the standards of home movies, it is lo-fi and boring. The narrator looks awkward, the camera work is amateurish, and other than some elephants swaying gently, tails swishing, in the background, nothing really happens. Nobody comes. Nobody goes. It’s... well, awful.

Jawed Karim is the ‘star’ of Me at the zoo. Wearing an oversized black windcheater over a dark blue top, Karim looks nervously into the camera. Behind him is the elephant enclosure at San Diego Zoo. He seems to speak off-the-cuff – or is practising the comedy of excruciation. It is a one-take, 19-second video. One scene, with no special effects or change of focus. It is the kind of movie you would make if you had no experience of making films and had just got a new video camera. Haltingly, Karim says:

‘Alright, so here we are in front of the elephants. [Pause]. Um, and the whole thing with these guys is that they have really, really, really long, um, trunks… and that’s cool.’

Karim looks back to the elephants and then back to the camera, then adds: ‘And that’s pretty much all there is to say.’

The video truly stretches the definition of ‘compelling content’. Yet, at the time of writing, 60 million people have seen Me at the zoo.

While looking like any other awkward twenty-something man with a degree in computer science when confronted by a pack of pachyderms, Karim was doing something that would be viewed again and again by future generations. He was making the first YouTube video.

At the time, online video was hardly a practical proposition, at least for ordinary people. Download speeds for most people in the western world were slow. Superfast fibre broadband was out of the reach of many, too expensive and too complicated to install in most homes. Apple’s touch-screen iPhone was two years away, a sleek, shapely glint in Steve Jobs’ eye. Instead, computer users had to make do with a slow broadband connection or an even slower dial-up modem connection, which took minutes or even hours to load dense content like videos.

When 25-year-old Karim was standing in front of the elephants, the internet revolution was transforming the market for information, including financial data such as share prices, and practical information and news, rather than imagery. California was the beating heart of the startup world, where innovators were exploring the possibilities of this revolution. Typically several companies were battling it out in the same space. In the early 2000s if you wanted to search the internet, you could Ask Jeeves, Google, Altavista or any number of other smaller competitors.

Once the early potential of online video was spotted, the same happened there. Some visionaries grasped that, at least in theory, video, and more specifically, ‘video blogs’, could be the future of the web. Several video sites were set up between 2003 and 2005. Israeli entrepreneurs launched Metacafe in 2003. Two were started at the end of 2004 – Vimeo established a platform for independent film-makers and Grouper hosted the sharing of photos, video and music.

Vimeo’s co-founder Jake Lodwick was among these video visionaries who gave a presentation at the first convention devoted to discussing the possibilities of this visual age. Vloggercon began on the fourth floor of an 11-floor block at 721 Broadway, New York, at 9am on 22 January 2005. Movers and shakers in the new world of video blogging had anticipated the convention for weeks – and the event had spread beyond the small group of digital pioneers. ‘Our intimate gathering has become a bit of a spectacle,’ remarked organiser Jay Dedman before the event, held at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program building.

What’s most striking about the discussions those first vloggers held over the course of the one-day meeting was their prescience. Introducing one session, entitled ‘Content is King’, Dedman, a TV journalist at CNN International, outlined what made the new method of broadcast unique. ‘The thing about video blogs is it’s not television in the sense that it’s a one-way thing,’ he told the assembled audience of around 50 people – only half of whom he estimated had ever made a video. ‘You’re doing it because you get comments, you get track-backs, you can start a conversation.’ Other discussions revolved around how people could make money from video blogging.

Just three days after the conference, on 25 January 2005, Google, which was winning the lucrative race for search, also entered the fray. With the resources of its wealthy parent, Google Video was the favourite to sweep up the exciting possibilities of the visual age.

Google, however, would find itself competing with three geeky men who had started a challenger company called YouTube. Among them were two immigrants. One was Jawed Karim. Karim had arrived in the United States as a teenager with his German mother and Bangladeshi father. At the University of Illinois, the hardworking Karim combined his bachelor’s degree in computer science with work at a new internet payment startup called PayPal. Also working at PayPal was a university friend, Steve Chen, whose family had emigrated to Illinois from Taiwan. There they met Chad Hurley, a fine artist with a sensitive soul, who had designed PayPal’s original logo. (In a sign of the interlinking origins of California start-ups, Chen also worked briefly at a new social network, Facebook, started the previous year by another computer programmer, Mark Zuckerberg.)

Late on Valentine’s night 2005, the three computer pioneers registered YouTube.com. Two months later the site went live with Me at the zoo. The vision of its founders was simple: ‘We’re the ultimate reality TV,’ Hurley told reporters. ‘Giving you a glimpse into other people’s lives.’

Karim, Chen and Hurley were the first YouTubers. Their timing was good. The world was on the cusp of a video revolution that would pivot the text-based internet into a visual one. Digital stills cameras were beginning to replace film-based ones among the general public. Meanwhile, affordable handheld video cameras – camcorders – were being put in the hands of ordinary Joes, too. Nonetheless, the video revolution was jerky and grainy in its early days. One would hook up a laptop to a TV via an HDMI or RGB composite cable to see fuzzy, pixellated videos, poorly shot in questionable lighting, from creators with obscure usernames like DaxFlame, WhatTheBuck? and Wheezy Waiter. Some were downright odd. DaxFlame, for instance, was a character actor, a quirky, oddball teenager with ideas above his station who would smirk with disdain while telling and sometimes acting out creepy stories he said happened in his life. Others, though, would be in the more traditional vein of vlogging: single individuals talking through the camera.

In November 2005, videomakers Anthony Padilla and Ian Hecox launched a new comedy channel: Smosh. At first they lip-synced to childhood TV programmes’ theme music, then developed their own brand of oddball sketch comedy. Within a few months, Smosh was the most popular channel on YouTube, scaling the heights of 2,500 subscribers. There was a significant drop-off in viewers for the next most popular channels.

In 2005, YouTube carried no advertising; it was just running through $3.5 million of investment Sequoia Capital had pumped into the business. Like many tech businesses at the time, such as Amazon and Facebook, the business model was to lose money until there was a way of making some – to enter the digital elevator on the ground floor.

So, content creators who uploaded their videos didn’t earn any money. They just had the satisfaction of seeing something they had made being visible to the world, on a platform with great potential. They might become part of the brave future of video sharing, when technology improved, as it surely would.

Other innovators, however, had solved this problem: how to make a living from making videos. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the file-sharing program Napster had opened up a world of content to anyone who was willing to withstand the painfully slow download times and to flout copyright laws. Ian Clarke and his friends, Steven Starr and Oliver Luckett, had come together in a desire to push the boundaries of the web, creating digital services in the public interest. Together they created Freenet, the world’s first decentralised peer-to-peer network.

In October 2005, they founded Revver, a content-sharing website. Its premise was simple – to reward people financially for their creativity. After testing a range of early prototypes, including an online music store that allowed bands to upload their songs and used machine learning to recommend music to users, the trio hit on what they felt best represented the future of creativity online: a website where people could upload videos of themselves, against which adverts would be sold.

‘We wanted to create a marketplace for creativity,’ says Clarke from his home in Austin, Texas, his Irish accent imbuing his words with bonhomie. ‘We concluded that short-form video content was really likely to explode.’ He and his co-founders assumed that the internet was spreading so quickly that broadband connections would soon be speedy enough to make streaming video online feasible. At the time many tech pioneers, including Skype’s inventors, were working on downloadable software to play videos. But Revver’s founders bet that rather than wanting to download a video-playing application, people would happily play videos direct from a website.

The Revver team still had to overcome three issues. Firstly, how to allow people to upload their short-form videos easily. Secondly, how to monetise those videos, and, thirdly, how to share the advertising revenue from them with their creators. They decided early on to split any money 50/50 with creators. Implicitly, videomakers would be responsible for their content, and only they would be able to upload it; it was theirs and they should benefit.

Revver had a public service ethos, innovative ideas and, now, a way of incentivising creators to choose its platform over rivals. It was well-placed to take gold in the race to capitalise on the growth and wealth of the video revolution.

Only one rival could stop it – by finding compelling content unlike Me at the zoo.

4. Viral comedy: YouTube laughs all the way to the bank

What could attract more viewers than showing the best TV clips for free?

In December 2005, the US comedy show Saturday Night Live broadcast a digital video sketch starring Andy Samberg and Chris Parnell called Lazy Sunday. In the two-minute video Parnell and Samberg rap about how they want to buy cupcakes and watch The Chronicles of Narnia. Watched with the benefit of hindsight, Lazy Sunday is a little dated: the sharp-edged topical jokes have been blunted by time, and the over-the-top delivery is now pat.

But at the time it was a major event. Put up on YouTube, the clip went viral. In its first week it received two million views. There was just one problem: NBCUniversal, which owned the intellectual property, hadn’t uploaded it. (This was an issue that Smosh faced in its early days: in fact, their existence on YouTube is because they tracked down an unapproved upload to the site, saw what they liked, and stayed.) For Jorma Taccone, who had created the Saturday Night Live skit with fellow writer Akiva Schaffer and Samberg and Parnell, that wasn’t an issue. ‘We were watching numbers on a site we had never heard of. It was this double whammy: we always got associated with the internet, but it was television that made it possible,’ he told Variety later. But for NBCUniversal’s lawyers, that was their content, and it had been illegally uploaded. No matter that the video was an enormous advert for Saturday Night Live, or that it was giving what Taccone called ‘second life to television’. It wasn’t making money for NBCUniversal (nor at the time was it making money for the ad-less YouTube).

Here, however, the different approaches of the video pioneers played out. Grouper and other sites were quick to tackle copyrighted material uploaded to their platforms, partly because they didn’t want to unpick who should be paid what in the event of competing claims. Revver had audio fingerprinting and a team of manual reviewers checking for copyright infringement. It didn’t allow Lazy Sunday because ‘it was obviously copyright infringement’, according to Clarke. In tune with its public ethos, Revver wanted to reward copyright owners — the creators. It wanted to pay creators with advertising revenue. It had prioritised revenue over reach.

By contrast, YouTube had prioritised reach over revenue. It wanted views. It eventually pulled the Lazy Sunday clip in February 2006, placing a short note on its blog stating: ‘YouTube respects the rights of copyright holders.’ Copyright owners complained that YouTube was slow to take down offending videos, by which point users might have moved on from a sketch show to homegrown content. YouTube tended not to investigate where its content came from until someone complained. YouTube was not taking ads, but its content was highly watchable. In its two months online, Lazy Sunday was viewed seven million times.

Viacom, the conglomerate which owned NBC and Nickelodeon, later sued YouTube, alleging massive copyright piracy was integral to its business. In the deposition, Viacom complained:

‘Some entities, rather than taking the lawful path of building businesses that respect intellectual property rights on the Internet, have sought their fortunes by brazenly exploiting the infringing potential of digital technology. YouTube is one such entity.’

Viacom claimed that Lazy Sunday was just one of at least 150,000 unauthorised clips of copyrighted programming – viewed 1.5 billion times – that had been shown on YouTube. However, Viacom protested that was only a tiny fraction of the copyright-infringing material on the site, because ‘YouTube prevents copyright owners from finding on the YouTube site all of the infringing works from which YouTube profits.’ The lawsuit was settled.

Josh Felser, a co-founder of Grouper, later reflected: ‘YouTube exploded on the backs of Saturday Night Live’s Lazy Sunday clip and a ton of “illegally” shared copyrighted content.’ Revver’s Clarke said: ‘A lot of YouTube’s early growth was due to content they were distributing without the permission of the copyright holders… If the game is building a website that is solely focused on letting people upload and share video, then YouTube pretty much was winning that game out of the gate.’

As well as its relaxed attitude to copyright, YouTube had other advantages. It was fast and clean. While contemporary competitors could sometimes struggle under the weight of overwrought design, YouTube was slick. Load up the homepage back in 2005 and just like today, a viewer was thrown headlong into the stream of content, with thumbnails of five recently viewed videos presented horizontally and a smattering of featured videos beneath. The idea was obvious: let’s get watching – and quickly.

At the time, YouTube was mostly hosting a mishmash of ripped-off TV clips, occasional animation and lo-fi home movies. Although the quality was often poor, it could also be strangely appealing. For the first time, viewers could find an ocean of alternative videos unmediated by television executives. Some were compelling, especially when it was a vlogger speaking directly into the camera, sharing their life. One such early creator was an American girl broadcasting from her bedroom. Uploading her first video to YouTube on 16 June 2006, Bree Avery called herself lonelygirl15 and explained she was a 16-year-old who was being home-schooled. She would complain about her parents grounding her, how she had to do homework during summer holidays, and how she found out her friend Daniel had a crush on her. All the while she explained how much she loved YouTube and discussed her favourite creators. Her tell-all approach to her audience captivated viewers. Fans would find her MySpace page and send her messages. She would respond. YouTube wasn’t just showing reality TV of real people’s lives. It was allowing viewers to interact with the real people they were watching.

Another early star in summer 2006 was Michael Buckley, a camp 30-year-old administrative assistant from Connecticut. He just wanted to post some clips of him presenting so that he could get a job in television. Instead he began to make a name for himself in the small world of YouTube, becoming one of its first true stars alongside actor Lucas Cruikshank, whose voice was digitally manipulated to become the character Fred Figglehorn, a six-year-old with anger management issues.

Buckley’s vlog, WhatTheBuck?, took an acerbic sideways slant on celebrity news. His show featured Paris Hilton’s latest antics, Britney Spears’s public breakdown and American footballer Michael Vick’s arrest on charges of illegal dog fighting. Buckley’s persona was ‘a bitchy, rambling pop culture expert talking head’ and his quickfire wit and putdowns perfectly fitted the grubby, anarchic medium. He would stand in front of a green screen, passing sly comments as grainy photographs of actors and pop stars appeared over his shoulder then disappeared. Buckley claims he was among the first YouTubers to ask for likes and comments from his fans: ‘I made opening credits that said: “Rate it even if you hate it” and the next week everyone was asking for likes and comments.’

At the time, audiences were still relatively small. There was, however, a real feeling of community among the creators. Buckley recalled: ‘YouTube in 2006 was people just uploading videos of their pets or very weird comedic sketches they’d shoot with themselves. There was no high quality content. But there were very high, very personal interactions within the community because there were so few of us. We’d go to a YouTube event and there were 10, 20 of us. We were all on a first name basis.’

Such direct-to-camera confessionals and commentary won viewers galore. Within 18 months of launch, YouTube had become a phenomenon. Its traffic quadrupled between January and July 2006, when it broke into the top 50 most-visited websites, with 16 million visitors. Jack Flanagan, an analyst for Comscore, which provided the figures, forecast that advertising dollars would move online ‘where consumers can be targeted with efficiency.’

By September 2006, Smosh’s subscriber numbers had rocketed to 17,500, making it the fourth most popular channel on the site. Audiences for each individual video were still small. But the potential was vast. YouTube was outclassing its rivals. Metacafe had struggled to fund its producer rewards programme where it gave creators $5 for every 1,000 US views above 20,000. Others moved into niches, such as Vimeo, which hosted high-quality videos by musicians and film-makers.

By now Google Inc, the star performer in California’s Silicon Valley, was experiencing exponential growth. Google had floated some of its shares in an