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May 9, 2022
Despite its cultural ubiquity, most people know nothing about what goes on at YouTube, writes Bloomberg technology reporter Bergen in his intriguing debut. He charts the company’s history, starting with its founding in 2005 by graphic designer Chad Hurley and his programmer friends Jawed Karim and Steve Chen, at a moment when entertainment was shifting from broadcast TV to reality show and eventually MySpace. In its scrappy startup days, YouTube struggled to rein in pornography, violence, and illegal content, and its content moderators were often left in horror at what they’d seen. But the fact that contributors could make astonishing incomes in ad revenue kept the mainstream videos flowing in, with product unboxing videos garnering millions of views and kid stars getting rich. Bergen also suggests YouTube’s 2006 acquisition by Google shielded it from some of the bad press Facebook and Twitter got for allowing misinformation to be shared on their platforms, and takes note of the legal issues, political challenges, and conspiracy theorists that the company still has to reckon with. And the idiosyncratic service has ended up as a microcosm of its own, he writes: “In a little over a decade, YouTube had evolved... into one of the most dominant, influential, and successful media businesses on the planet.” Those curious about how YouTube got to be the behemoth it is should pick this up.

June 1, 2022
A tech journalist traces how YouTube works--or fails to. Bloomberg reporter Bergen seeks to bring the behemoth into the light. Though YouTube has billions of users and countless hours of content, the founders of the company--Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim--are largely unknown outside of the tech industry. YouTube's current CEO, Susan Wojcicki, has a low profile by the standards of the social media business. When it started in 2005, the concept of having users provide content was simple, but the mechanics were complex. Once the site was operational, the growth rate was astonishing. Videos about games, music, fashion, celebrities, and, of course, cats: There seemed to be something by--and for--everyone. When Google paid $1.65 billion for YouTube 10 months after its launch, it seemed like an incredible amount. Of course, it turned out to be an excellent investment. The massive size of YouTube, however, presents a host of managerial problems. "It's a tanker, an enormous business steered with small, careful turns," writes Bergen. "Even if she wanted to, Wojcicki probably couldn't steer it entirely in a chosen direction. She is a steward of a platform with a life of its own." A central issue has always been the proliferation of posts that were unsuitable, including fake news, pornography, conspiracy theories, and terrorist videos. They appear faster than the algorithms and moderators can deal with them. The deluge stemmed from the open-to-all business model, and constant changes to the rules have often generated more confusion than clarity. As the author shows, all this raises fundamental questions: When does content moderation become censorship? Where is the line between disinformation and a different opinion? What are the obligations of a social media platform? There are no easy answers. Bergen mostly keeps the story straight, but any account of the company is going to be a tale of barely controlled disarray. That is part of YouTube's attraction--for better or worse. Powerful insight into a ubiquitous yet still shadowy company.

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July 29, 2022
In its less than two decades of existence, YouTube has managed to become one of the dominant forces on the internet. It is at least on par with Facebook and Google; some might argue with merit that YouTube exceeds them in terms of cultural impact. Bergen's opus follows the history of YouTube, looking at how its founders and crafters built such a behemoth, and how they dealt with the myriad of issues and problems encountered along the way--and continue to encounter. One of the things that set YouTube apart was that the service's own users provide its content, along with the revolutionary concept that they would be paid. The more popular the video, the more money was to be made. Along the way, they've had to cope with the internet's dark underside: the hate speech, the fake news, the con artistry. But their continuing success is undeniable. In extensive, and sometimes overlong, detail Bergen shows how it was done. For both YouTube's content providers and consumers, it's an interesting journey.

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