Is YouTube the way everyone will get their, “15 minutes of fame,” did Andy Warhol know something about YouTube in the late sixties?
“They” say that information in the world has more than doubled in the last few years! This is in part to the file sizes of video and the fact that now almost everyone has a camera or video device and is uploading all this information. Where’s it all going? On the Internet the big collectors would be Facebook and other sharing, social or archiving sites. There is also this new business model called – the Cloud.
One of the biggest monsters in this space is owned by the biggest Internet monster of all, Google. How they got the clearance to get both these properties together was and is still questionable. After-all, the second biggest search engine on the Internet is YouTube…
Heres what Wikipedia has to say: YouTube is a video-sharing website, created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005 and owned by Google since late 2006, on which users can upload, view and share videos. The company is based in San Bruno, California, and uses Adobe Flash Video and HTML5 technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including video clips, TV clips, and music videos, and amateur content such as video blogging, short original videos, and educational videos.
Most of the content on YouTube has been uploaded by individuals, but media corporations including CBS, the BBC, Vevo, Hulu, and other organizations offer some of their material via YouTube, as part of the YouTube partnership program. Unregistered users can watch videos, and registered users can upload an unlimited number of videos. Videos considered to contain potentially offensive content are available only to registered users affirming themselves to be at least 18 years old. YouTube, LLC was bought by Google for US$1.65 billion in November 2006 and now operates as a Google subsidiary.
Both private individuals and large production companies have used YouTube to grow audiences. Independent content creators have built grassroots followings numbering in the thousands at very little cost or effort, while mass retail and radio promotion proved problematic. Concurrently, old media celebrities moved into the website at the invitation of a YouTube management that witnessed early content creators accruing substantial followings, and perceived audience sizes potentially larger than that attainable by television. While YouTube’s revenue-sharing “Partner Program” made it possible to earn a substantial living as a video producer—its top five hundred partners each earning more than $100,000 annually in 2012 CMU business editor characterized YouTube as “a free-to-use… promotional platform for the music labels”. In 2013 Forbes‘ Katheryn Thayer asserted that digital-era artists’ work must not only be of high quality, but must elicit reactions on the YouTube platform and social media. In 2013, videos of the 1.1% of artists categorized as “mega” and “mainstream” received 90.3% of the relevant views on YouTube and Vevo. By early 2013 Billboard had announced that it was factoring YouTube streaming data into calculation of the Billboard Hot 100 and related genre charts.
Observing that face-to-face communication of the type that online videos convey has been “fine-tuned by millions of years of evolution”, TED curator Chris Anderson referred to several YouTube contributors and asserted that “what Gutenberg did for writing, online video can now do for face-to-face communication”. Anderson asserted that it’s not far-fetched to say that online video will dramatically accelerate scientific advance, and that video contributors may be about to launch “the biggest learning cycle in human history.” In education, for example, the Khan Academy grew from YouTube video tutoring sessions for founder Salman Khan’s cousin into what Forbes‘ Michael Noer called “the largest school in the world”, with technology poised to disrupt how people learn.
YouTube was awarded a 2008 George Foster Peabody Award, the website being described as a Speakers’ Corner that “both embodies and promotes democracy.” The Washington Post reported that a disproportionate share of YouTube’s most subscribed channels feature minorities, contrasting with mainstream television in which the stars are largely white.
A Pew Research Center study reported the development of “visual journalism”, in which citizen eyewitnesses and established news organizations share in content creation. The study also concluded that YouTube was becoming an important platform by which people acquire news.
YouTube has enabled people to more directly engage with government, such as in the CNN/YouTube presidential debates (2007) in which ordinary people submitted questions to U.S. presidential candidates via YouTube video, with a techPresident co-founder saying that Internet video was changing the political landscape. Describing the Arab Spring (2010- ), sociologist Philip N. Howard quoted an activist’s succinct description that organizing the political unrest involved using “Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world.” In 2012, more than a third of the U.S. Senate introduced a resolution condemning Joseph Kony 16 days after the “Kony 2012” video was posted to YouTube, with resolution co-sponsor Senator Lindsey Graham remarking that the video “will do more to lead to (Kony’s) demise than all other action combined.”
Conversely, YouTube has also allowed government to more easily engage with people, such as a healthcare exchange’s commissioning of Obama impersonator Iman Crosson‘s YouTube music video spoof to encourage young Americans to enroll in health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). The White House‘s official YouTube channel was the seventh top news organization producer on YouTube in 2012.
Some YouTube videos have themselves had a direct effect on world events, such as Innocence of Muslims (2012) which spurred protests and related anti-American violence internationally.
TED curator Chris Anderson described a phenomenon by which geographically distributed individuals in a certain field share their independently developed skills in YouTube videos, thus challenging others to improve their own skills, and spurring invention and evolution in that field. Journalist Virginia Heffernan asserted in The New York Times that such videos have “surprising implications” for the dissemination of culture and even the future of classical music.
The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers and the YouTube Symphony Orchestra selected their membership based on individual video performances. Further, the cyber collaboration charity video “We Are the World 25 for Haiti (YouTube edition)” was formed by mixing performances of 57 globally distributed singers into a single musical work, with The Tokyo Times noting the “We Pray for You” YouTube cyber-collaboration video as an example of a trend to use crowdsourcing for charitable purposes.
The anti-bullying It Gets Better Project expanded from a single YouTube video directed to discouraged or suicidal LGBT teens, that within two months drew video responses from hundreds including U.S. President Barack Obama, Vice President Biden, White House staff, and several cabinet secretaries. Similarly, in response to fifteen year old Amanda Todd‘s video “My story: Struggling, bullying, suicide, self harm”, legislative action was undertaken almost immediately after her suicide to study the prevalence of bullying and form a national anti-bullying strategy.
For attribution and the full article: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube
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