YouTube: An Insider's Guide to Climbing the Charts

Chapter 1. What Is This YouTube of Which You Speak?

Alan Lastufka

YouTube and Online Video: A Brief History

Before sites like YouTube made sharing video online an everyday occurrence, it was very difficult to show your friends and family your latest clip. Weird errors having something to do with "missing codecs" were usually what you found staring back at you from your CRT monitor, rather than your nephew's first steps or your brother's extreme bike stunts. YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen were tired of this happening to them, and they assumed others were too.

Together with Jawed Karim, the three former PayPal employees created a video-sharing service that would be accessible to almost every single computer with an Internet connection. You could upload all varieties of file formats and compression settings, and YouTube's behind-the-scenes magic (server computers and proprietary software) would process the file and give you a link to your video that could easily be emailed to anyone and viewed on any connection from dial-up to a T1 line.

Note

It's okay if you don't understand terms like compression settings or codecs right now; we will explain these, and other technical terms, as they pertain to your videos later in this book.

Although in hindsight it may seem like a no-brainer, YouTube was the first of its kind. The potential for millions of people, from experienced Hollywood filmmakers (which YouTube has) to 16 year olds who just received their first webcams (which YouTube also has) could post their work in the same arena, with the same tools available to both from the same website.

Jawed uploaded the very first video to YouTube, a short clip of himself at the zoo, in April 2005, www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw (URL 1.1).

The new YouTube site didn't instantly take off. In the early days, YouTube tried a number of promotional gimmicks to attract users, including offering money via ads on Craigslist to hot, young women who would post videos on the site, as well as giving away free iPods to random active users every day for a month.

Eventually, these gimmicks, in addition to word of mouth and quite a bit of press, garnered some solid traffic for YouTube. But in the beginning, there wasn't anything to keep someone for more than a few minutes; they watched one or two clips and then clicked elsewhere. This changed very rapidly, however, as a community of users formed. This community inspired, supported, and rivaled each other—something the founders never anticipated. Chad and Steve assumed most users would utilize the site to send family video to out-of-town relatives. But users started registering and uploading videos of themselves simply talking about their lives and their opinions and asking others about theirs. These users came to be known as vloggers (video bloggers), and these vloggers quickly formed a community. (Blog means web log, a frequently updated online text diary of sorts.)

Note

Vloggers existed before YouTube and have even found fame outside of YouTube; the popular daily vlogger Ze Frank (who is now retired) is one such example. Vlogging is simply sharing your life, your opinions, and your feelings with others via video. The term is not exclusive to YouTube.

The community has, in fact, become such a powerful force on YouTube that we've devoted all of Chapter 8 to it, and we will mention the community often throughout the other chapters.

As the number of YouTube visitors continued to grow, so did the press. Time Magazine named "You" the Person of the Year for 2006 and helped cement YouTube as the number-one site for sharing videos online. So large is its following that YouTube streams more videos each day than all of its major competitors, including MySpace and AOL Video, combined.

Quickly taking note of YouTube's unique user base and functionality, Google, the search engine giant, purchased YouTube for more than $1.6 billion dollars in 2006. Google could offer YouTube users more server bandwidth (faster service) and better promotional tools (the integration of AdSense for YouTube Partners, covered in Chapter 11), along with Google's patented, powerful search engine.