When YouTube, then only a young start-up, was bought by Google for $1.65 billion in October 2006, the tech giant was making a billion-dollar gamble on the future of online video. Google later admitted that it had overpaid at the time, and analysts were sceptical whether it was worth it, as the initial copyright lawsuits started to roll in over the prolific intellectual property breaches across the platform.
16 years later, YouTube is the second-most visited site in the world. It is populated by production studios, small creative teams, and individuals all side-by-side, uploading everything from high-end productions to meme compilations on a platform that forms the infrastructural backing of online video. YouTube’s ad revenues for 2021 were $28.8 billion (a year-on-year growth rate of 45.9%) and accounted for 11.2% of total Alphabet revenues. In terms of strategic soft power, its ownership has landed Google at an advantage in terms of digital real estate and market competition for advertising revenue.
Yet, YouTube has done more than simply dominate the online video space. Its unique positioning as the original home of user-generated content sparked the shift from creation as a professional pursuit to a casual, everyday activity that any consumer could try themselves. Flash animations, funny compilations, cat videos, vlogs: entire content genres that had never before truly existed suddenly had a hub on which to be published, shared, and reacted to. This shifted the entire dynamic of what it meant to be a creator versus a consumer, ultimately setting in motion the creator economy that we see emerging today.
The video app has adapted with the times as more tools and applications have emerged. It allows creators to monetise, offers subscription and ad-supported tiers for viewers, and has introduced Shorts as a competitor to Reels and TikTok. Creators of all genres and career paths must have video on the site; be it film trailers, music videos, promotional ads, or recorded Twitch streams of gameplay.Those on their path to learning a craft will all, at some point, have turned to the platform for video lessons. And their public failures will find their way to compilation videos.
Creative consumer culture may not have been born with YouTube, but it is on YouTube that it found a voice loud enough to transform the future of the digital entertainment space.