ColdFusion - How BIG is YouTube?

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Starting point is 00:00:38 audible.com slash coldfusion. That's Audible.com slash C-O-L-D-F-U-S-I-O-N. After you sign up, check out Ready Player 1 and let me know what you guys think in the comment. You are watching Cold Fusion TV. Welcome to another Cold Fusion video. Today, YouTube is the single biggest disruptor of video media on Earth. from independent small films to news media and entirely new genres of programming. When YouTube started, it was truly something different from anything that had come before it.

Starting point is 00:01:23 It was all in the name. The you in YouTube was in reference to the producer. And the aim was to broadcast yourself. This theme was highlighted in 2006 when Time magazine's Person of the Year was you. The caption on the cover read, Yes, you. You control the information age. Welcome to your world.

Starting point is 00:01:43 And this was entirely true. In the beginning, we had the power to turn YouTube into anything that we wanted. One of the most popular sites on the internet is YouTube is where people from all over the world post their homemade videos for anybody to see. They had 60,000 clips a day, get millions of hits. But recently, some people don't feel the same way. Some say that the true essence of YouTube has been diluted with corporate interests, coupled with drama and demonetization running rampant. But today, in this video, we'll just focus on YouTube, its size and size, and some of the internet. some fascinating insights into how it's changed our world. This is going to be a pretty interesting video.

Starting point is 00:02:17 Let's get straight into it. YouTube was started by three ex-Paypal employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Joward Karim. The year was 2005 and it was an interesting time. There was no such thing as a smartphone as we know it today. Rap and R&B were in, but so was Emo and Post Hardcore. And the CGI in movies was just starting to become okay. One day in 2005, the trio realized that it was hard to find a copy of Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction that occurred in the 2004 Super Bowl. This problem sparked an idea.

Starting point is 00:02:56 There had to be an easier way to upload and share videos. They knew the technology existed. It was just a matter of building the right website to take advantage of it. So they did. It was a really small team to begin with, just a group of a few guys who thought it would be a really awesome project. So to give you some idea of how small the team really was, We basically had two test admins, more or less, two software architects dealing with scalability issues. We had two feature developers doing everything that the user see.

Starting point is 00:03:26 We had two network engineers building a network that pushed tens of gigabytes per second. And one DBA, and we hadn't been bought by Google's and no shafts yet. And if you think I'm kidding about the drinking or sleeping parts, uh, and nope. It was such an awesome project that Google took notice. Just one year later in 2006, Google would buy YouTube. Fast forward to today, and now the website is a totally new world of sharing video content on a massive global scale never seen before. So the question must be asked, how big is YouTube?

Starting point is 00:04:07 Every minute, 400 hours of video are uploaded, it's an ocean of images and sound offering all kinds of experiences imaginable. 38% of users are female and 62% are male. 1.3 billion people around the world use YouTube. In 2006, this was just 20 million. Together, these 1.3 billion people watch 5 billion videos per day. Every day, 1 billion hours are watched on YouTube with half of these views coming from mobile devices.

Starting point is 00:04:39 So 1 billion hours sounds kind of meaningless, but let's break it down to give you an idea of just how massive that is. It's over 100,000 years of video content, or 15 times the amount of time lived throughout all of recorded history in video format every single day. The site gets 30 million visitors per day, and 80% of that is outside of the United States. YouTube is the second biggest search engine behind Google and the third most visited site on. the internet behind Google and Facebook. Fun fact, Gangam Style actually broke YouTube when it crossed 2.14 billion views in 2013. That number was the highest integer that the 32-bit view counter could handle, so it had to be upgraded. Now YouTube can support over 9 quadrillion views per video.

Starting point is 00:05:32 As early as 2012, YouTube was already larger than cable TV in the United States. To put the final nail on the coffin, in March of 2017, YouTube launched YouTube TV, a direct take on cable TV at a slightly cheaper cost than the competition. For $35 a month, users get over 40 cable channels but also can see related YouTube content. For example, reactions and commentary on a recently screened episode of a show. YouTube TV is only available in selected areas of the United States at the time of recording this video. The average viewing session for YouTube in 2016 was 40 minutes, a 50% of 50% an increase over 2015. A large part of this is due to YouTube's recommendation algorithm, which

Starting point is 00:06:17 I admit gets me stuck on discovering new things for hours at a time. But also, a lot of this growth has come from so-called developing nations. According to the International Telecommunications Union, in 2000, for every three internet users in a developed country, there was only one internet user in a developing country. Today, it's switched. For every one internet user in a developed country, There's now two users in developing countries. All this new access to the internet means more access to YouTube. So how does YouTube work? YouTube's main cost comes from the bandwidth, hardware and power consumption of their servers.

Starting point is 00:06:57 Even since 2007, it was revealed by early Google programmers that each video was hosted by a mini cluster server. So the advantages of using a mini cluster is as follows. 1. There's more disks serving content, which means more speed. 2. Redundancy. If one machine goes down, another one can take over. And three, there are online backups. So how has YouTube influenced society? So we know some of the biggest stars have gotten their start on YouTube. These include, regrettably Justin Bieber, or not so much, Donald Glover from Derek Comedy.

Starting point is 00:07:35 Melanie, will you marry me? No. What the f-the-f? The girls from Broad City, or the boys from workaholics. And in the reverse, it's now common to see familiar faces like The Rock, Terry Cruz and Stivo do collabs with bigger YouTubers. In a way, this shows that YouTube and traditional film may be starting to have a crossover. I find this really interesting.

Starting point is 00:08:00 But let's go deeper than all of that. What's the real impact YouTube has had on society? In 2010, the owner of TED Talks Chris Anderson noted that crowd accelerated learning from YouTube could dramatically accelerate knowledge resulting in the big. biggest learning cycle in human history. Perhaps that hasn't happened just yet, but I do know that I've learned a great deal of skills, like video editing for example, just from watching tutorials on YouTube, and I'm sure some of you can relate to that.

Starting point is 00:08:28 It's also common for YouTube videos to be shown in schools and universities around the globe. Watching what we want, when we want, in an individualist nature, is a fairly new concept. The VHS and audio cassette recorders were the earliest form of individualist media consumption. YouTube, in a way, is the next step to this concept. We no longer need to record, just find the video and press play. The videos are archived forever, ready for us to access. For the first time, mankind has a digital video archive of our society, both from the point of view of individuals and our culture in general. However, this archiving goes even before YouTube's inception in 2005. As I described in my other video about YouTube, since 2013, there's been an

Starting point is 00:09:15 increasing phenomena of people posting VHS video recordings of old TV shows, news, music videos, and anything from the 80s and 90s. This nostalgia wave has become so apparent that one of the most interesting sites I've come across has spawned from it. There's actually three sites dedicated to 70s, 80s and 90s video content. They're called My 70s, my 80s and my 80s and my 90s TV.com. It's basically a website where you can look at the world through a particular decade with the power to shuffle through years and it's kind of the same as if you're a couch potato just sitting and watching TV all day during that particular year.

Starting point is 00:10:07 A guy charged with theft, possession of drugs and abuse of services after robbing a 7-11 shaking down a cable repairman and several other incidents. That's just like show off what you can do, right? Yeah, exactly. And you can have a really impressive screensaver now on your desk. if you want. Now I can also press a magical button here, the M key, and voila. Not only can you have stills, but you can put video in there as well. All right, Gizmos 98 and 25 apps, what, 50 bucks, you can do that?

Starting point is 00:10:43 Very impressive, thank you. All right, that's our look at Windows 98, etc. I'll be back in just a minute with my pickaboo. All of the content on the TV of that site is powered by YouTube VHS videos. I actually find it's really interesting to take a look at history, not fill through any lens. You can really draw some interesting observations that way. YouTube isn't just cats vloggers and viral videos anymore. The platform is starting to grow out of that and it's becoming a real challenge to the old media power structure. For example, a YouTuber such as Philip DeFranco could break a news story

Starting point is 00:11:19 and get millions of people informed without the need for traditional media. Established news outlets don't really like this because it's costing them subscriptions and money and they'll use any excuse to taint the brand image of YouTube. That brings us to the recent controversy between the mainstream media and the new media on YouTube. The rivalry was always bubbling, but really exploded in early 2017 when YouTuber, PewDiePie was unfairly misrepresented as a racist Nazi by the Wall Street Journal and Friends. These news organizations reported a clear parody as truth for clickbait. For a bit of context of why this might have happened, we have to look at this through the

Starting point is 00:11:59 eyes of the mainstream media. They're losing money and viewership directly to YouTube, but the most important thing that they're losing is trust. Most of the general public can feel that the media isn't always telling the whole truth about things, and with statements like this, I guess it's no wonder why. The economy worsens, he could have undermined the messaging so much that he can actually control exactly what people think. And that is the, that is our job.

Starting point is 00:12:28 After this, there was of course the famed advertiser boycott in March of 2017. In the middle of March of 2017, reports began servicing that big brand ads were appearing against ISIS videos. After this, one by one, large advertisers began to leave YouTube as it was seen as a racist terrorist breeding ground. This caused other large advertisers to fill the pressure if they didn't join the boycott. The theories as to the real motives of the boycott are still debated, but some think that it was just an excuse to cut costs because profits were down globally. Others say that it was just an effort by the mainstream media to drag YouTube down along with their dying legacy. Regardless of the real motives, $750 million has already been lost and this will turn into billions of dollars being lost for YouTube over the coming years. Without advertisers, YouTube couldn't exist.

Starting point is 00:13:19 Those expensive servers aren't going to pay for themselves, so YouTube had to do something. The solution? Increase filtering and modify algorithms. But this has come at a cost. Some independent YouTube news outlets have been demonetized for having views that don't seem to line up with the accepted mainstream narrative. This has been done under the guise of being too controversial. Some people have viewed this as indirect censorship. It even goes wider reaching than this. One of my favourite channels, H3H3, has been hit pretty badly with this.

Starting point is 00:13:52 These policy changes in YouTube stifle the art of comedy in a way that's reminiscent of radical political correctness. If this keeps going, eventually nobody's going to be able to have an opinion on YouTube. In my view, I think it's not really YouTube's fault. YouTube is just trying to survive. It's more than advertisers that are out of touch. This could go two ways. Either the creativity keeps getting stifled on YouTube and it becomes a shell of its former self. Or if YouTube plays its cards right and manages to fix this situation,

Starting point is 00:14:23 this advertiser controversy could just be a blip in the road. Okay, let's finish up on a light note. Remember how the 2006 person of the year on the cover of Time magazine was you? Well, some people with a sense of humor actually put this on their job resumes, so it read that they were person of the year for 2006. I stumbled across this in a Reddit thread and I found this pretty funny. One of the responses particularly caught my eye. User Bubba Bee writes, I had it on my resume while studying in New York City for three years, 2011 to 2014. I applied to 30 positions during that time, went on maybe 20 interviews, I had 10 job offers,

Starting point is 00:15:06 I accepted six job internships. Not a single person ever asked about it, not once. I brought it to career counsellors at one of the most prestigious schools in the country and no one said a peep. I can't explain it. I really can't. So I just thought that was something funny to end out the video. I think looking back in a broad sense, with billions of people watching tens of billions of hours of content every week, YouTube is an incredibly impressive achievement and I hope it sticks around for a while longer.

Starting point is 00:15:37 It's crazy that I've been watching YouTube since 2006. I kind of grew up with it and I'm sure many of you can relate. To have something like YouTube ready and available to all of us is actually something pretty special. So that's it. That was just a bit about the origins of YouTube, its size and its impact on society today. Anyway, thanks for watching guys. Maybe leave a comment about what your favorite YouTube YouTube channel is. If you just stumbled across this video, feel free to subscribe to this channel for some more awesome content. This has been to GoGo, you've been watching Cold Fusion, and I'll catch you again soon for the next video. Cheers guys, have a good one.

ColdFusion - How BIG is YouTube?

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