Technology with tech Stuff from half stuff works dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I am your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer here at how Stuff Works and I love technology, and today we're going to cover the final part of our three part episode on YouTube, the YouTube Story. There's a ton of stuff has happened over the relatively short number a short time that YouTube has been around, but it's important to talk about because YouTube has had such a huge impact on multiple aspects of culture in general and online culture in particular. Now, when we left off in the last episode, it was the beginning of twelve and YouTube had announced the launch of premium channels. In this episode, we're gonna follow up on that and catch up onto what YouTube has been up in recent years. So let's first jump right back into the CEO. Salacamonga had announced a push toward the lean back viewing experience. Now, this is a concept that was carried over from television. The idea is to create a slate of programming that encourages a viewer to stick with the experience and continue watching once your selected video ends. The television example of this would be something like the must See TV strategy for YouTube and meant tweaking algorithms so that viewers would be prompted to watch a related video to the one they just finished, one that would presumably meet their preferences and encourage them to stay with the platform. One thing YouTube tried to do to encourage more binging activity was to change up how it determined which videos it should recommend to users in the first place. Now, in the past, the videos that got lots of clicks, those viral hits of yesteryear, were given extra love. They were put in a prominent place on YouTube landing page so that you were more likely to click on them. So, in other words, if you shot a video and it got a lot of attention early on, you were rewarded. You've got more prominent placement on YouTube's landing pages. Thus you got even more opportunities together views, and it could just skyrocket from there. On the surface, that seems like a pretty solid idea, because people are clearly already drawn to watching that popular video, so giving it a better position would drive even more traffic, right, But the folks at YouTube saw how this could be a problem, and it's a problem that stretches well beyond YouTube itself, because focusing on that metric made it really hard to convert people from watching one video to watching more than one video. And what's worse, you couldn't guarantee that all those views meant someone watched a video all the way through. So if I click on a video and decide within the first ten seconds it's not really a video for me, and I click away, my view still counts, but it may not mean that that video is particularly good. It may mean that the title or the thumbnail was really interesting or really enticing, and that's why I got me to click. And once I saw that what I thought I was getting was not what I actually got, I clicked out. Well, you don't want to reward that because it's not a great user experience. So YouTube decided that the best way to convert people into watching multiple videos was to look at watch time on videos, as in, how much overall time did people spend watching that video. So if you uploaded a twenty minute video and people were only watching the first thirty seconds, chances are that video would just sink to the bottom of YouTube's vast library under this new regime. But if you uploaded a twenty minute video and people were on average watching at least nineteen minutes of it. That suggested the video you uploaded had real value to it. So YouTube began to shift and promote videos that had longer engagement times rather than just a lot of hits. And as I said, websites across the Internet we're struggling with this same problem. If you run a site, let's even use how Stuff works as an example. Your ideal situation is that someone comes to your site to learn something cool. They read a specific article, then they noticed that there's all this other cool stuff on the website, and they spend a good amount of time exploring. People who have gone to Wikipedia and said, oh yeah, I went down a rabbit hole. I started clicking on links and learning about thing after thing after thing. That's what we're talking about. That level of engagement. While you don't want to see is someone coming to your site and then they bounce after they read one article, or worse, they read part of an article and then they bounce. They don't even click all the way through. So YouTube's change in policy opened up the door to a new type of YouTube celebrity, being the gamer. Now, don't get me wrong, people had been uploading video game footage with or without commentary for years, and only a few YouTubers had really gathered a large following through the process. But with this change in policy came an unexpected consequence. Video game related videos began to rise in the ranks, and that's because of a few different reasons that relate to video games and video game audiences. For one thing, the audiences were wanting to watch a complete video of their favorite personalities or their favorite games. Then audiences of other videos were so if you have a video where there's a particularly charismatic gamer or there's a really cool game on their people were more likely to watch it all the way through. It became a real career path for some people to create video game related content and uploaded to YouTube, because if you could find an audience of a decent size and the stuff you uploaded was entertaining enough, you can see your videos receive a lot more love because again, your videos tended to be longer. Let's play, video in a video game might be fifteen minutes or forty five minutes or an hour or even longer than that, and if people are watching all the way through. Because of YouTube's new ranking system, you would be given preferential treatment because you had a greater amount of watch time for your video. So we started seeing these let's play videos, which would follow a gamer's experiences as he or she played through a game on a regular basis, and those videos had a built in story progression. In fact, I had a double layer story progression because you had the story within the game itself what is actually happening as the game unfolds, and you had the story of the gamer's journey. What is happening to the gamer? Is he or she controls a character or other element within this game. Now, we humans love a good story, and we hate it when a story gets left off right as you're getting to an interesting moment. And if we were a little further into this episode, I'd be a smart alec and I would put an ad break right here. But we're not there yet, so I'll just keep going. So let's play videos encouraged viewers to watch the whole video, and they inspired binge watching, as viewers wanted to see an entire story from beginning to end. So let's say you start an episodic game or a game that has a very long play through one episode might be an hour, and it might represent only a fraction of the entire game, and your next episode is the next hour of that game play. Well, if someone discovers your videos and they like you, they might start binging from beginning to end. They want to see the whole thing, and they're eagerly awaiting the next chapter. So those pretty long videos would end up getting massive rankings in YouTube results. You would land on the landing page and see them at the very top. The combination of features meant that the metrics of the YouTube algorithm were all being pinned by let's play videos, and they began to take over all of YouTube, including the homepage. In fact, at some points, fIF or more of the videos featured on the homepage where game being related videos. And out of all of those games there was one that was really dominating, and that one was Minecraft. Now, at this point, I have to give a shout out to a YouTube channel called The Game Theorists. It's a really good YouTube channel. The guy does an excellent job breaking down elements of games and game culture, and he did a great episode about this very topic. He really dives into the change of the YouTube algorithm and the effects it had on the platform in general, as well as the launch of a brand new industry in video game videos that really didn't have a lot of traction up to that point. He has an episode titled game Theory, How Minecraft Broke YouTube, and it was extremely helpful and it's also entertaining, so you should check it out. As the game theorist points out, YouTube's change in its algorithm would lead to game dominating that homepage for a few years, until YouTube executives made a conscious decision to course correct in mid two thousand fifteen and filter all those gaming videos out of those home pages. We'll talk more about that a little bit later. Now. There were some other unintended consequences of this change in policy. For one thing, shorter videos had a harder time getting discovered because you had a system that was rewarding videos for the amount of time that was spent watching those videos. A one minute animated short couldn't compete with a fifteen minute Minecraft video, And the same was true for artists who uploaded cover songs or short performances. Anything that was less than ten minutes was going to have a harder time showing up as a recommended video. Simply because it was not as long as those longer pieces that had really good engagement. So that was another argument against this. It wasn't just that video game footage and video game content was taking over YouTube. It was that suddenly things that were legitimately well made and entertaining we're not surfacing because the length was a detriment. The algorithm was punishing these videos in effect because they were too too short, and that was a problem. YouTube also updated its YouTube TV feature to create a more user friendly experience for people watching YouTube on their television screens, which was good because more devices and even televisions were starting to support YouTube content. But navigating a user interface on a television is a different experience than on a mobile device or a PC. You typically don't have a mouse and keyboard, so finding the right way to navigate the app so that you encourage people to use it rather than frustrate them is pretty challenging, and figuring out how to do it so that each instance of the app is optimized for the specific viewing experience of the user adds even more difficulty. Two thousand twelve was also an Olympics year, and YouTube partnered with NBC for the London Olympics to provide live streaming of events. This was a departure from the way Olympics coverage had worked in the past. It used to be back in the day that the way you'd watched the Olympics is you'd have to wait for a localized broadcast of Olympics coverage well after the actual events had happened. But in the era of Twitter and Facebook and the Internet in general, it became impossible to avoid spoilers. With this time delay approach. You would find out that people had one or lost in their respective Olympic events, and you'd still have to wait hours before you could actually watch it, which didn't really give you an incentive to tune in. TV networks had experimented with some streaming services in the past, but two thousand twelve marked the first time that YouTube was being used as a primary outlet for Olympics coverage. This was a tall order because at times there were up to a hundred different feeds populating YouTube, providing live footage of different events, and that wasn't the only live event YouTube covered in two thousand twelve. It also served as a platform for more presidential debates and eight million people watched YouTube live to witness Felix baum Gartner's space jump that happened on October two thou twelve. That event set the record for the largest number of concurrent viewers for a single YouTube live event. Now the top videos of two thousand twelve, apart from gandam Style, which I've already mentioned, including Walked Off the Earth's cover of Somebody that I Used to Know by Got You walk Off the Earth. There's a group that makes creative music videos and finds complicated ways to play songs, so in that example, it involved five people playing the song on a single guitar. It's a fun video and it's also a fun band that writes original music, so you should check them out if you haven't heard of them. There are other big videos that came out that year. Call Me Maybe by Carl ray Jepson was another popular video that complimented the earworm of a song. Epic Rap Battles posted a win with their Battle of Barack Obama versus Mitt Romney episode, and not all popular videos were for pure entertainment. One that ended up getting a lot of views was a documentary titled Coney two thousand twelve. This was a documentary that detailed the effort to capture Joseph Coney, a Ugandan military leader who had been indicted for war crimes. Now, the documentary sparked a heated debate not just about the particulars of the case, but about online activism. Some critics said that the documentary bordered on slacktivism, which is when you take an action that ultimately has no real impact on the outcome of a situation, but it gives you the satisfaction of feeling as if you've accomplished something. So selactivism is a real problem. Many movements online don't really amount to anything more than just that simple feeling that you've supported a cause you believe in, but you haven't actually done anything. But there are others who argued that the video helped bring attention to a real crisis in Uganda and wasn't sla activism at all. As for Coney himself, he is still at large in Uganda, although his support has reportedly diminished significantly. At the hight of his influence, he commanded thousands of guerilla soldiers. Today it's supposedly closer to a hundred. Now let's segue into but you know what before I jump into that, how would I take a quick break to thank our sponsor? All right, now we're in and YouTube I mentioned earlier had sort of launched an award show, but they had quietly shuffled it off. It was called the YouTube Awards, and after two thousand and eight they really didn't talk about it anymore. They didn't really bother to do them again, but in the company launched a new awards show called the YouTube Music Awards or y t m A. Nominees were announced on October two thirteen. They included a lot of different people, but some of the nominees were Demi Lavado, Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber, and Epic Rap Battles of History, among others. The winner for Video of the Year was I Got a Boy by a group called Girls Generation, which I had never heard of. Do you hear about them? Ramsey? Ramsey shaking his head, no, he also has not heard of them. Well, it just shows that our K pop knowledge is severely lacking. It's a Korean band, so I've heard some K pop, but I did not know about this group. So I apologize for my ignorance. But apparently, UH pretty good group at least, it got a lot of traction and won the award that year. YouTube tried to get into paid subscription services in two thousand thirteen with the launch of about thirty paid premium channels. These channels included everything from Sesame Street to UFC events, hopefully without any crossover, although that would be amazing. It covers a pretty broad spectrum. Obviously, on the low end of the scale, some of these channels were asking for ninety nine cents for a monthly subscription. According to Variety, the average was closer to two dollars cents a month now. A lot of those channels focused on family friendly content, much of it specifically aimed at younger kids. The initiative didn't really catch on with customers, however. Variety followed up the launch with a story in July two thous thirteen that stated many of those premium channels hadn't seen very much subscriber activity at all. National Geographic VP of Global Strategy Adam Sutherland summed up as company's perspective with the quote, we had hoped to set the world on fire. We are not setting the world on fire right now. End quote. Mark Cuban gave a similar response with regards to a YouTube premium channel called hd net, saying it was quote working, okay, not amazing end quote. YouTube had hoped that these subscription model channels would provide another source of revenue on top of ad money and rentals, but viewers were not flocking to this new alaca cart service, and eventually all the way up in the seventeen so just last year, YouTube would find a phase out this experiment entirely. By then, the company had introduced a different subscription service called YouTube Bread. But while chat about that more when we get there, another failed experiment in two thousand thirteen really backfired on YouTube and Google. It was in that Google made the decision to unite YouTube with Google Plus. Now in part, this was an effort to cut down on trolling and abuse by requiring YouTube users to register with the service using their real names. To have a Google Plus account, you had to use your actual name, at least initially, and so thought YouTube executives. YouTube commenters would have all their comments tied to their actual identities. This, they thought would cut down on extreme cases of abuse and trolling, because anything you said would be linked to you as a person and not just a handle that may or may not belong to you. Now, I haven't really touched on it in these episodes, but YouTube comments have long been seen as one of the pits of user engagement online. YouTube comments are often the ones held up as saying this is an example of a bad experience for a content creator. That's not to say that all content creators get terrible comments from YouTube users, but it does happen frequently enough that the phrase never read the comments has become pretty common common parlance in the online world now. The response to this particular move of YouTube and Google Plus logins being merged was extremely negative among a large population for different reasons. Some people were angry that their handles, which they had possessed for ages, were going to be stripped away. They had built a lot of time and effort into developing a persona that was represented by a handle. Some were arguing that the anonymity offered by YouTube's previous policy allowed people to more honestly communicate with the outside world, and even offered up protection up from potentially oppressive regimes that could punish someone for speaking out against them online. So, in other words, if you force someone to tie their actual identity to their YouTube profile and they upload a video that is somewhat critical of an oppressive regime, they could end up getting targeted by that regime. That was a real concern. Others were worried about an online brand they had established through years of work and content creation. So let's say that it's a person who is known by a particular nickname. Put pie is a good example. They said, well, that's where all my value is. Don't make me give that up. And many accused Google of trying to artificially boost the popularity of Google Plus by requiring YouTube users to create a profile on this languishing social networking site. I mean, and to be that last accusation holds the ring of truth because I remember when Google Plus was in beta, the only people who were on it were entrepreneurs and tech journalists. So I was one of those people, and initially it was great. I loved using it because it felt like I knew everyone, or at least knew of everyone who was on the platform. When Google Plus opened up to everyone, there was an initial flood of new users. Everyone was eager to be part of this new thing, and that was a big problem for a lot of those early adopters. Now, it wasn't just that there was an element of exclusivity with Google Plus in those early days, although that was definitely part of the appeal. It was that this small population made it much easier to connect with people in a relatively narrow niche. So I could network with lots of people in tech journalism pretty effectively because we were the only ones on Google Plus. But as the new people found out, and as most of us already had figured out, Google Plus did not have enough to differentiate it from other social platforms like Facebook. So the question became, why would you move from Facebook, where nearly everyone you knew already had a profile to go to Google Plus. It didn't set itself apart enough to really have its own strong appeal, and so once those floodgates open, the limited use case of a social networking platform for tech journalist nerds like myself was eradicated. So Google found itself with a big social network platform with a lack of users and a lack of engagement. Thus, requiring YouTubers to join Google Plus might have been seen as a hail Mary pass to try and get something going on the social network site. The man that move was met with major resistance. People hated it, and it wasn't just the commenters, but also the creators. Eventually, in Google would officially back down from this policy and no longer require YouTubers to have a Google Plus account. Bradley Horowitz, who was the vice president of Streams, Photos and Sharing, would create an official Google blog post stating that users wouldn't need a Google Plus pro file to access Google services anymore, and that YouTube would be the first platform that would see rollouts of those changes now. The videos that were really popular in two thousand thirteen included the infamous music video what does the Fox Say? By TV nor Man. We really love our novelty songs on YouTube. Also, do you remember the Harlem Shake I Do? That was a meme that lasted for about a month and then kept on going for a month too long. Harlem Shake videos first really got their their go in Uh. There was a comedic video about how animals eat their food, which is absolutely ludicrous, and I have to admit I think it's pretty funny. There was a video featuring Steve Cardinal who was doing a parody of Miley Cyrus's Wrecking Ball on the The anonymous and Random chat service chat Roulette, so people would connect with him and then suddenly a naked Steve Cardinal would swing in on a Wrecking Ball to Miley Cyrus's songs that got a lot of a lot of views. There was a prank and a coffee shop in which patrons thought they were witnessing a demonstration of telekinesis, and a terrifying kind of horror movie way just a little entertaining. One of bad lip reading videos went big. There was a bad lip reading video of the NFL, so another channel that ended up getting very popular around that time. There was the Mozart versus Scrilics video from Epic Rap Battles of History. So Epic Rap Battles that Can continued to do quite well in that year, and there were a lot of other music videos that were really popular, including Wrecking Ball. Blurred Lines was a big one, I think, but through the lens of twenty eighteen, we can all agree that Blurred Lines is a problematic song at best, and Katie Perry's Roar was another big one in now moving into other big big changes were starting to hit YouTube, and in February the company got a new CEO, Susan Wajiski took the helm of the company. Now, previously, Wajiski was the woman who owned the garage in which Larry Page and Sarah gey Brenn had set up the earliest Google Servers servers in Menlo Park. So Google, like a lot of big companies in the tech world, got its start in a garage. In this case, it was Susan Wajiski's garage. Now, she wasn't a executive just because she happened to own a garage. That would be ridiculous. She actually came to Google from the world of marketing. She had been a uh She had worked in marketing for Intel and then in came over as the marketing manager for Google. At Google, she oversaw a project called Google Video Service, which was a competitor to YouTube in the early days. In fact, it was this service that had engineers scratching their heads back in the early two thousands saying, well, why is anyone bothering with YouTube? I mean, why would they go there because they're gonna watch videos that are at really low resolution when they could go to Google Video Service and see them in much better clarity. But rather than dwell on that seemingly paradoxical situation, which honestly really wasn't that surprising. YouTube's service was taking on the burden of transcoding all the videos off the user. What Jski decided that the right thing to do was to make Google acquire YouTube to make that move, So she was an advocate in the early days, and in fact, that is exactly what Google did, So she was incredibly influential from the early days of YouTube, even when she wasn't working there. Specifically, what Jsky's experience and advertise it was seen as a potentially transformative asset for the future of YouTube. She had also presided over the company during a period in which more women were joining the ranks of the company. She even wrote a piece for The Hive, which is a publication under Vanity Fair, and in that she detailed how YouTube had gone from a company that had women making up of its workforce to one that then boasted of its workforce with an intent to do even better in the future. Now, her tenure has not been free from scandal, as we'll see, but she has also been an outspoken voice for women in technology, in a movement that has been gaining momentum over the last couple of years. We've seen that in numerous realms, but YouTube is one of those that we've seen it prominently displayed. Some of the top videos from included the Mutant Giant Spider Dog, which was a friendly dog wearing a spider costume used to prank people in various public locations. They would encounter what appeared to be enormous webs with weird fossilized stuff hanging in in lots of webbing, and then this friendly little dog wearing a terrifying tarantula costume would come running down whatever the street the sidewalk and scare the pants off of people. Uh. I mostly felt sad for the dog who just wanted to make friends. There was a short film from a filmmaker named Tatia Paliva who created a movie called First Kiss. It was a short film of like three and a half minutes long which showed twenty strangers meeting and then kissing for the first time, and it was both awkward and sweet and surprising. I guess both is the wrong word to use because that was more than two things. But an interesting video. Epic Rap Battles again got a video within that top ten, and this one was a rap battle between Goku and Superman, which again shows me that I'm very much disconnected from the pop culture of today, as I had to look up who Go Coup was. Please don't judge me, to be fair. I love epic rap battles of history, and I know what a lot of them are, just not didn't know that one. Music videos that were big that year included Shaken Off by Taylor Swift, All About That Base by Megan Trainer, dark Horse by Katy Perry, and Bailondo by Andricue Iglesias. So music videos tend to get broken out in a different category from most watched videos. YouTube does a retrospect every year where they talk about the videos that got the most traffic throughout the year, but they differentiate music videos from everything else in We saw in February that year, YouTube launch a new mobile app called YouTube Kids, and boy, howdy has that gone crazy now? It was meant to be a simplified YouTube app that would serve up age appropriate material for children, and kids tend to be crazy binge watchers of content. They will watch video after video after video, so it was a great thing for YouTube. It was an arguably great thing for parents. Who needed to give their kids something to entertain themselves with. UM. It also featured special parental controls that were supposed to keep any inappropriate material away from kids. That being said, it has not been immune from controversy, particularly in I'll touch on that when we get there, but it's bonkers, y'all. In August of YouTube launched YouTube Gaming. This was Google's attempt to transition gaming from that homepage where it was dominating month after month, onto its own home so that way, the homepage would feature videos that were mostly unrelated to gaming, and as the game theorist postulated, this could have been a way to present to the average viewer videos that had a more mainstream appeal to them. May have been an effort to avoid having YouTube thought of as a gaming video platform, which could turn off anyone who wasn't into gaming. So let's say you tell your buddy, hey, you know you should check out videos on YouTube. They go to the YouTube landing page, they see that half the videos on that landing page are are gaming related, and they think, well, that I don't really have an interest in this. That was what YouTube's fear was. They wanted to make sure that they had as much opportunity to hook people as soon as possible, to get them watching and get those AD dollars generated. Man YouTube gaming was also seen as a way to compete with Amazon's Twitch TV service. Users would be able to subscribe to YouTubers for a fee and get special privileges and features in return, like various things in chat and it's very similar to the way that Twitch does things. So that was an effort to create a new subscription model as well, and in October, YouTube introduced a new service called YouTube Bread, yet another subscription service, but this one was platform wide as opposed to channel specific, so for ten dollars a month, users get an ad free experience, and it also includes the option to download videos for offline viewing, which comes in kind of handy if you want to watch something on a flight, for example. The company also started to produce original content gathered under the apt lead titled category YouTube Originals. Those originals included material from celebrities and YouTubers, including the series Scare Beauty Pie would eventually be canceled in the wake of some of pdpies more offensive behaviors. YouTube also acted as a movie studio and helped sponsor Rooster Teeth's film laser team. The company also announced a new music app called YouTube Music that was intended to help users discover new music they might like. So you could create a station for yourself. It would have a customized playlist of music just for you. You You can also recommend music to friends using this app. Unlike Google Play Music, which the company also has that would allow you to at your own playlist, you could not create your own playlist under YouTube Music. YouTube Music would generate the playlist for you based on your preferences. Later on, in sen YouTube's head of music stated that Google Play Music and YouTube Bread would merge to create a new music streaming service. No telling if YouTube Music will be part of that. This really demonstrates one of the big problems I have with Google in general, which is that there's so many different products that all seem to be offering the same sort of thing that it's very confusing. Even as someone who follows this as part of my job, it's confusing. So someone came up to me the other you know, let's say, two days ago, and said, can you tell me what the difference between YouTube Bread, YouTube Music, and Google play Music is. It would be complicated because, as it turned out, if you subscribe to YouTube Bread, then you would have additional features in YouTube Music as well as Google Play Music. So it's not something that's easy to explain because it's all muddled, and hopefully Google will be able to streamline. That was also when Google restructured itself and created an umbrella company. That umbrella company called Alphabet. That's the one that presides over all of Google's properties, and some divisions within Google would spin off and become separate companies under Alphabet, but YouTube would not. It would remain a subsidiary to Google itself. Some of the big videos of Salento watched Me by ten King was incredibly popular, and we saw a whip in Nena appear pretty much everywhere after that. One Roman at Wood posted a video called Crazy Plastic Ball Prank, in which he filled his home with hundreds of thousands of plastic balls as a surprise, which was greeted with disbelief and then delight. That actually makes it the type of prank I love because no one's unnecessarily horrified or traumatized or injured by it. And I know I'm a softie, and thus prank videos are probably not me, but this one I thought was good. It was cheerful and positive overall, as opposed to making people feel badly about themselves. Mainstream media really began making an impact in on YouTube, lots of videos from sources like The Tonight Show and The Late Late Show We're appearing on the list of most watched videos for that year. James Gordon's car pool Karaoke was beginning to take off, and the one with Justin Bieber, who you'll remember got his start on YouTube, was one of the most viewed clips of that year. And one of the original works out there that was not part of mainstream media that got on the list of most watched videos of was the SloMo Guys. They got forty million views with their six foot Man and a Giant six foot water balloon video. The SloMo Guys in general, I love their videos. They're really entertaining, the technology they use is great, the shots they get are great, and I highly recommend them. If you have not seen any of their videos, go check them out, because, uh, seeing stuff in ultra SloMo is really fascinating. Sometimes, like seeing something that happens way too fast for the human eye to detect being broken down frame by frame when you're shooting tens of thousands of frames per second is really neat. So that brings us up to sixteen. So we're getting into the home stretch now. Before I jump into that, I want to take one more break to thank our sponsor in YouTube joined the ranks of Google, Twitter, and Facebook in uh not great category. They were targeted for misinformation during the US presidential election cycle. The Verge reported in October that back during the campaign system our cycle rather a Kremlin linked group spent about four thousand, seven hundred dollars on advertising to affect the outcome of the election and to spread misinformation, which is kind of terrified to think that's such a relatively small investment could have a potentially huge impact. Although I have to rush into say it's impossible for us to know how much sway that advertising actually had on people. We can't just assume that the ads move the needle, to be honest, we don't have that that evidence. But it has become part of a larger conversation revolving around finding ways to prevent foreign parties from influencing the political processes of other nations, particularly using online sources like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, that kind of thing. Starting enabled to sixteen, YouTube changed this policy so that videos that were in dispute could still monetize during the dispute process, So whichever party would win the dispute would ultimately be awarded the money that was generated during that monetization period. So that way, if a creator was judged to have made lawful use of copyrighted material or not have infringed on copyright at all, he or she wouldn't be denied the revenue they would have made during the arbitration process. Up to that point, everything was put on hold. So if you think about it, videos tend to have a sweet spot when they are going to be discovered and viewed and shared the most frequently. And if during that sweet spot your video was tagged as being in violation of some copyright, and then you successfully were to defend your video, you would miss out on all of that traffic and thus all of that revenue. This was YouTube's attempt to counteract that. To change that policy, the company rolled out a new advertising policy in two sixteen, or rather, according to YouTube, they began to enforce an existing policy, which became known as the Advertiser Friendly Content Policy. Now, basically, here's the problem. Some advertisers were seeing their ads pop up against videos that were a controversial or not in alignment with that company's values. This in itself is pretty easy to understand. So let's say you own a company that makes let's say, microwave ovens, and you see that an ad for your company pops up on an offensive video. You probably wouldn't be very happy about that. You don't want your product associated with someone who is espousing offensive beliefs or remarks, or otherwise depicting something objectionable, whether it was a video that included hate speech or a violent video or sexually suggestive video. Advertisers were beginning to express concerns to YouTube, and some of them were starting to pull their money from the service, and this would continue on into TV and so in response, YouTube said it would crack down on videos that contained offensive material. Now, at a casual glance, that's not necessarily a bad thing. You can understand the point of view of the advertisers, and you don't necessarily want to reward people who are being hateful online. If someone is making videos that is that, you know they're they're attacking a vulnerable group like a marginalized group and there heaping hate upon that group. You don't want to see that kind of behavior rewarded monetarily. But on the other hand, someone has to define what offensive actually means, and that's very tricky. Sometimes that means grouping in content that might be controversial but isn't in any way hateful or harmful. So that could include videos in which people have frank discussions about sensitive topics. The videos may have real value and they might add conversation around those subjects. But some creators were seeing their videos demonetized because an algorithm had seemingly arbitrarily decided that their videos were inappropriate, sometimes maybe just based upon the description or title of the video alone, not the content. Now, in general, creators began seeing advertisers pulled back from YouTube. Some creators who had banged on YouTube as their source of revenue began to suffer as a result. A few even called on what Ski to resign in response to this. They called it a controversy really, and the ad shakedown would continue throughout and into seen as more problematic videos convinced advertisers to pull up stakes in to jump ahead just a bit, YouTube announced that it would change its practices and require all channels applying to the Partner program to undergo a policy compliance review. In addition, channels would have to accumulate at least ten thousand lifetime views to qualify for the Partner Program. And this particular story continues to unfold at the time of this recording, so there's a lot more to say about it. Some of the videos in sixteen that were really popular included in another prank video called Brothers Convinced Little Sister of Zombie Apocalypse, which I feel badly about thinking is funny. In the video, some brothers have their sister has just been to the dentist to have her wisdom teeth removed, and so she is still under the influence of some anesthetic and it's thus a little foggy mentally, which I can completely sympathize with, as I have infamously gone on long, meaningless rants, even more so than the podcasts you have listened to while under the influence of various an aesthetics when getting oral surgery. So this was a pretty mean, but a meddally kind of funny prank where they tried to convince her that there was some sort of zombie outbreak and they were trying to respond to it in real time. I feel like a bad person for liking it, So I'm going to reflect on that for a while after this episodes over. Other big videos that had more mainstream media representation that year would include clips from car Pool Karaoke. Adele's appearance topped the list as being the most watched video of that year. A clip from John Oliver about Donald Trump made the top ten list. A clip from lip Sync Battle featuring Channing Tatum dressed up as Beyonce and lip singing to Run the World, Run the World was another big one. A video from America's Got Talent featuring Grace Vanderwald, who plays the world's greatest instrument and by that I mean the ukulele, also made the list. Um. We also got another non ctistical video in pen Pineapple Apple Pen. I found out about that long after the video had spiked in popularity. I still don't get it. If you get pen Pineapple Apple Pen, please let me know. I just I'm old and don't get it. All right, Well, what about last year? So you remember that YouTube kids mobile app I talked about. This was the year when that app kind of captured mainstream media attention for going totally crazy. So the problem was lots of weird videos were showing up on the YouTube Kids app. Some of them seemed just surreal and absurd and kind of disturbing because they were so unreal. Some of them were just so random that they were really unsettling. In that case, some of them were clearly made by trolls who were apparently trying to create upsetting content on purpose. But as various people began to look into it, one thing that seemed to be happening was that a lot of those videos were being created by using algorithms to filter through the data on YouTube Kids. You see, there were ways of finding out which words were being searched for the most on the app, and if you found a collection of words that we're getting a lot of traffic, then you wanted to create a video to capitalize on that traffic. And this stuff changes pretty quickly, so you also want to streamline your video creation process. You want to automate as much of that as possible, so that way, if there's a trend to search for certain terms like spider Man and frozen and uh sesame street, that you're able to create a video that is in some way capitalizing on all of that. Now, not only does this go into weird areas of intellectual property issues from trademark to copyright problems, it also would create these weird videos that seem nightmarish. You would watch them and think this is a fever dream made into a video. And there were a lot of very disturbing ones, and it caused a lot of parents to complain to YouTube. Again, a lot of articles in about this issue about these odd and sometimes very upsetting videos for an app specifically meant for kids. YouTube's response was, this really does concern us. YouTube Kids is an app that's made by parents who very much want to create an app that will appeal to children and not harm them in any way. So it's an ongoing situation as of the recording of this podcast. To me, it's really fascinating to see this very cynical and automated approach to creating ideal content in in terms of a search, right, it's not ideal content for the experience of the user, but rather you're banking on certain things kids like repetition. Kids will watch the same videos over and over and over again, and it doesn't have to make sense. Kids don't mind it if you've got a song that's super simple that kind of appeals to them. Actually, so if you have a very simple song that's just got a lot of repetition to it, and you've got a lot of colorful characters that the kids identify easily, then it doesn't matter that the video is not saying anything important or doing anything interesting. Uh And and kids are actually pretty hardy as well. They can handle some weird, screwed up stuff better than adults can at some points. But still you don't necessarily want your children having unrestricted use of that. And the parental controls on YouTube kids weren't always able to filter are out the more bizarre elements that were showing up in the app. So that's continuing to go on as we're talking now. Something else that happened in Seen was that Google decided to put an end to those paid channels I mentioned earlier and switched specifically to the subscription service, which really, to me, is is not that different. It's kind of just semantics at that point. But it was a shift in YouTube's approach to trying to generate revenue in a way that wasn't related to rentals or to add revenues. Some of the videos that were big in ten included The Shape of You with the Kyle Hanna Hanna Gami choreography. Uh, the Ping Pong Trick Shots three video by Dude Perfect, which is pretty much what it sounds like, this guy doing some amazing trick shots using ping pong balls. It makes me wonder how many takes were required to get some of them, because they are pretty phenomenal. Ed Sharon's appearance on Carpool Karaoke was one of the top videos of twenty seventeen. Lady Gaga's Super Bowl halftime show was another one. Uh. I thought that was an amazing halftime show. I remember watching that when it happened. Children interrupt BBC News Interview was a top video of twenty seventeen and is possibly one of the best videos to have ever been uploaded to the Internet ever. Uh. There's a particular moment where you see a child walking in a super exaggerated strut, and I just want to walk that way all the time always at this point, the video that got the most views of all of ten not only got the most views, but became the most watched video of all times so far on YouTube, that would be desposito, which it felt like it was impossible to avoid in seventeen especially if you work out in my gym and has received more than four billion views so far. So it is a phenomenon. We're probably gonna see a lot more changes. I got an email just recently from YouTube saying that my discussion tab on my personal channel will soon be replaced by a community tab where all the comments left in the discussion tab will be deleted within thirty days now. As of right now, when I last checked, my channel still has a discussion tab, but I'm told that the community tab will take place will take its place soon. I think that's kind of interesting, and there's so much more we could talk about. I mean, there's four hundred hours of content being added to YouTube every single minute. That number is just getting bigger and bigger. I'm very curious to hear how many computers are dedicated specifically to holding all that content. It's got to be an astronomical number. Keep in mind that for the purposes of delivering these views, Google has to build in redundant just the meaning every video is probably on at least two or three different computers. That way, if one computer housing the video goes down, another one can still serve it up every time someone wants to watch Lady Gaga super Bowl halftime show. It's a truly phenomenal amount of data and bandwidth and and just content that's going up. It's so hard to get discovered today. It's not impossible, but it is really challenging. But there's still the possibility that just the average person can go out there with a camera, shoot a video, upload the YouTube, and become the next YouTube superstar. It's a it's a long shot. It's not gonna be easy. It's it's becoming more and more like the competitive world of of established films and television. But it's still a possibility, and it's still a platform where the average person can create a video and share it with the outside world. Whether or not the outside world which is it is another matter. It's a pretty phenomenal website. Uh, phenomenal doesn't necessarily mean great, because they the people behind YouTube have made some really questionable decisions in my mind, over the course of its history. Some of them they've corrected over time. Some of them they've tweaked to the point where I can see why the decision was made and still might not be my ideal implementation. But then I'm not put in charge of a multibillion dollar company, and for that we can all breathe a sigh of relief. That wraps up this discussion of YouTube three full episodes to talk about the impact of this phenomenal website. Again, if you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff. Maybe there's a website you want me to talk about, or a specific technology. Maybe there's a person in tech I should do a full uh episode about, or multiple episodes about. Maybe there's a company you want me to talk about. Let me know. Send me an email the address tech stuff at how stuff works dot com, or you can drop me a line on Facebook or Twitter. The handle for both of those is tech stuff hs W. Remember you can go to twitch dot tv slash tech stuff and watch me record these episodes live. You can join the chat room and you can harass me throughout the entirety of the episode. 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