Review of LIKE, COMMENT, SUBSCRIBE
How YouTube Became Culture Television
You may have seen the news reports sharing results from surveys of children showing that anywhere from a third to over half of kids these days, depending on the source, want to be YouTubers when they grow up. YouTube has become the center of culture, an outlet for children’s content, educational videos, cultural commentary, how-to videos, and anything else you can think to film. Over 300 hours of content are uploaded every minute.
How did YouTube become what it is? In Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination, Mark Bergen tells the 15 year story of how a small video upload startup intended for dating became a hub for video across the world.
This book is less of a backstage view of the company development as it is how the company has interfaced with advertisers and content creators over its lifetime. And this relationship has faced two core challenges: content moderation and building machines to handle the scale of the content.
Moderation of content, especially on social media platforms is notoriously tricky business. YouTube is in a constant game of whack-a-mole trying to scrub their site of murder films, terrorism, and porn. To combat this never-ending problem, YouTube must build and monitor countless algorithms that can identify the right kind of wrong content. Although AI and machines can do a lot, they still struggle with context.
The machines that run YouTube are built from Google’s philosophy of automating, measuring, and tweaking – everything. It’s in part necessary due to the sheer scale of the operation, but it can cause headaches for YouTube and its creators. For instance, YouTube selects one primary target to build everything around. At first it was views, which selected for quick videos that had catchy (misleading) titles to get people to click. But when YouTube changed its primary metric to watch time, creators had to adjust, giving us the long-form content that YouTube is better known for now.
YouTube is the place for regular people to become superstars who make millions of dollars from their content. Like, Comment, Subscribe was a fascinating look into the complex relationships between the company and its creators, but I was expecting more about the company development, similar to The Founders story of PayPal. Overall, this was a great long read for folks interested in tech history.
Published: September 2022
Format: Hardcover
If you think this sounds interesting, bookmark these other great reads:
The Founders: The Story of Paypal and the Entrepreneurs Who Shaped Silicon Valley by Jimmy Soni (2022)
Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door-Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims (2021)
The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America by Margaret O’Mara (2019)
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