Autorentext

Mark Bergen

Klappentext

The gripping inside story of YouTube, the company that upended media, culture, industry, and democracy-by a leading tech journalist

Across the world, people watch more than a billion hours of video on YouTube every day. Every minute, more than five hundred additional hours of footage are uploaded to the site, a technical feat unmatched in the history of computing. YouTube invented the attention economy we all live in today, forever changing how people are entertained, informed, and paid online. Everyone knows YouTube. And yet virtually no one knows how it works.

Like, Comment, Subscribe is the first book to reveal the riveting, behind-the-scenes account of YouTube's technology and business, detailing how it helped Google, its parent company, achieve unimaginable power, a narrative told through the people who run YouTube and the famous stars born on its stage. It's the story of a revolution in media and an industry run amok, how a devotion to a simple idea-let everyone broadcast online and make money doing so-unleashed an outrage and addiction machine that spun out of the company's control and forever changed the world.

Mark Bergen, a top technology reporter at Bloomberg, might know Google better than any other reporter in Silicon Valley, having broken numerous stories about its successes and scandals. As compelling as the very platform it investigates, Like, Comment, Subscribe is a thrilling, character-driven story of technological and creative ingenuity and the hubris that undermined it.

Leseprobe
Chapter 1
Everyday People
Chad Hurley wanted to create something; he just wasn't sure what.
It was early 2005, and Hurley spent most of his time hunched over a computer screen in Northern California. Hurley didn't look like the brainy Poindexters around Silicon Valley. He had broad shoulders and a high forehead, a high school jock physique, and dirty-blond locks that he swept back surfer-dude style. He liked beer and the Philadelphia Eagles and considered himself an artist of sorts. With a friend, a kindred spirit, he had recently started a menswear line making laptop bags after finding most on the market ugly and dull. 
But Hurley, a web graphic designer, knew the real money was in computers, not bags, so that's where he and his two programmer pals, Jawed Karim and Steve Chen, hoped to strike gold. At twenty-eight, Hurley was the eldest, by a year, and de facto leader. He had a toddler son and had married into Silicon Valley royalty-his father-in-law was Jim Clark, a famed internet entrepreneur. Hurley began dreaming of his own company at the dawn of Web 2.0-websites filled with the work of regular folk, not professionals. Web surfers rushed to post online diaries, photo albums, poems, recipes, screeds, whatever they liked. "Everyday people," Hurley would call them. For months, Hurley and his pals had batted around proposals for a new internet business, meeting at his house in Menlo Park or a cafŽ nearby, where they discussed popular Web 2.0 fixtures to emulate, like Friendster, a social network, and the blogging websites growing like weeds. More often they talked about Hot or Not, a skeletal site that let people upload photographs of a face and vote on its attractiveness. Crude, but so popular. The trio knew one of Hot or Not's creators from a coffee shop they frequented at their old jobs, and they knew he was making decent money. That was cool.
The three finally settled on an idea for a website to let people share and watch video. On Valentine's Day they had stayed up way too late, crammed in Hurley's garage with his dog, and settled on a name for their idea. Hurley tried words that evoked personal television, riffing on old slang for the medium, "the boob tube." A tube for you. They typed it into Google. No results. That evening, they bought the web domain YouTube.com, a first step on solid ground. Eight days later Hurley opened an email from Karim with the subject line "Strategy: please comment."
The site should look good, but not too professional. It should look like it was thrown together by a couple of guys. Note that hotornot and friendster, while easy to use, don't look professional, and yet they've had enormous success. We don't want to look too professional because it scares people off . . . The most important aspect of the design is ease of use. Our moms should be able to use this site easily. Timing/Competition: I think our timing is perfect. Digital video recording just became commonplace last year since this is now supported by most digital cameras. There is one site I'm aware of: stupidvideos.com, that also hosts videos and allows viewers to rate them. Luckily the site hasn't caught on very much. We should discuss why this is the case, and why we expect our site to gain more traction. Hurley read on. Site Focus: Our focus should implicitly be dating, just like hotornot. Note that hotornot is a dating site without seeming too much like one. This puts people at ease. I believe that a dating-focused video site will draw much more attention than stupidvideos. Why? Because dating and finding girls is what most people who are not married are primarily occupied with. There are only so many stupid videos you can watch. Hurley was married but agreed that dating could motivate people to make and watch videos. "People want to see and be seen," he would write weeks later. Karim's email ended with a target date for YouTube's launch less than three months away: May 15, 2005.
They set to work. Hurley tinkered with the way YouTube.com would look to a visitor. Chen and Karim engineered the code to bring the site to life. Then, on March 20, Yahoo announced it was buying Flickr. Yahoo was a web titan, a valuable "portal" for online activity that raked in billions a year. Flickr, a sleek Web 2.0 service, let people upload digital photos. The press reported that Yahoo had paid as much as $25 million for the acquisition. The Flickr deal lit a fire. Karim sent another email, with the subject line "new direction": Chad and I were discussing today that the focus of the site should be more like flickr. Basically a repository for all kinds of personal videos on the internet.
In the coming weeks Hurley, Chen, and Karim doubled down and debated anew how their site should work. Like the dating site or the photo site? Hot or Not appealed to "hip college kids with raging hormones," Chen wrote in one email, while Flickr reached "designers, artists, and creative folks." Who would use YouTube? Should they make two sites? Hurley wavered on the Flickr model, concerned that video was more difficult to upload and edit online, but he also didn't want to pigeonhole the site. Late on Sunday, April 3, Hurley emailed the others that they should just get their site out into the world; they could "figure out where we are going down the road. "Ten days later an obstacle appeared on the road. Google put out a call online for people to submit amateur videos, which the company might then post for the world to see. Hurley would later recall his reaction: "Ah, fuck." Google was scarier than Yahoo. When Google started, it was one of many web search engines, but it quickly pulverized all its competitors. Now Google was starting to reveal its true ambition. On April Fools' Day 2004, it launched an email service, Gmail, with so much unheard-of free data storage that people assumed it was a joke. Then it announced a massive, free digital map of the planet. And now Google, spigot of cash, hoarder of brilliant programmers, was coming for YouTube. When Hurley and his pals next met, a new agenda item appeared: Should we give up?
á á á 
Chad Hurley grew up in Reading, Pennsylvania, and had landed in California the customary way: on a living room floor. After college, a small school in Pennsyl…