Author Mark Bergen unpacks YouTube’s inner workings
I have been covering Google since 2015. After 2016, YouTube became much more central to Google’s financial success, but at the same time, much more central to its political and business headaches. There was a massive boycott in 2017 of YouTube and a series of scandals. Like you guys, I was covering this bit by bit, firestorm after firestorm. I stepped back and realized this was big; every story felt like it was only scratching the surface. There was this very complicated platform problem.
I started the book at the very end of 2019, and I started doing some reporting mostly in 2020. I was really excited about going out and doing in-person meetings for the book, but then COVID-19 hit. It has been almost two and a half years of full-time reporting. That is actually one thing that I want to kind of get at with YouTube. It is one of the strangest platforms on the modern internet in modern culture. It’s among the oldest now. It feels understandable in some way. There are people that run large businesses entirely based on YouTube. It is a stable relationship in the sense that we can tell kids who want to be creators, “Just start shooting with your phone, start a YouTube channel, and a predictable set of things will happen.
A lot of the Wojcicki era, the most recent since 2014, is very consensus-oriented. I think that is partially why the decisions at YouTube move pretty slowly at times. I would describe it as a large tanker. They take very careful turns because every turn they make has big consequences. A way to put it is that they are mature. They have been around for a long time, and the book talks about how they went through the wringer with all these different problems.
As far as its impact on broader society and politics, I think the jury is still out on that. Part of the book says that this has been a really under-scrutinized platform, given its influence, power, and for a variety of other reasons. It’s a call to say, “Hey, we should pay more attention to this thing.”
That dynamic plays out in something you said earlier, which is that there isn’t a main character of YouTube. There isn’t a Jack Dorsey or a Mark Zuckerberg. That is not how Susan presents herself to the world. Is that by design? That may be partially it. My colleague Lucas Shaw coined this one: “the biggest music service that no one talks about.” It is huge. YouTube’s scale probably makes it the biggest podcasting service too, right?It is by far the biggest kids’ entertainment platform. It is the biggest place for finding videos about fixing your sink. The list goes on and on. I think its scale just makes it so it always wins those superlatives.
I think the most interesting inflection point going back about a decade — and this was a decision that was pretty key — was Google Plus. In the book, I recalled that I didn’t fully understand how critical that was to Google at one point.They were betting the company, and that included YouTube. It really frustrated people at YouTube. I don’t know how far along it came, but it was enough that it was a real consideration to put YouTube on the video tab of Google Plus.
At that point, unless you were blatantly violating copyright laws or hate speech rules, you were good to get monetized on YouTube. It built probably the biggest digital media economy ever. They had to dramatically scale that back and that had all sorts of consequences they are still dealing with today. Those would be my votes for the three.— for people who don’t know — is if you are a YouTuber of a certain scale like Mark is saying, then you can sign up to get your videos monetized.
Facebook has arguably the second-biggest ads apparatus and has not been able to figure this system out. It’s not for lack of trying. Google just has the benefit of having an army of sales people and advertisers that are very willing to give money to them. I’d be curious to see if/when Netflix and all these streaming services move into ads. That’s not necessarily a similar model, but that’s digital video advertising, and something that YouTube has had a lock on for years.
At that time, the only way to get monetized at the time was to be a star, a really big creator, or to be signed with an MCN. YouTubers just signed with MCNs in the tens of thousands, often without reading the contracts. That financial model then imploded for a variety of reasons. Basically, YouTube was like, “Wow, we don’t want these sketchy third parties to be running this. We can do it in-house.
Yes. I think they are surprised by the scale. I think that crisis in particular, the ads team was surprised. Sridhar Ramaswamy used to be the SVP for ads, and he has spoken about this publicly before. I watched these videos, and there was a really popular one called “Toys Freaks,” which is this whole complicated story too. I watched it and was like, “What?”
They were always pretty worried about that. Because these were creators and this happened during that crisis, they moved pretty quickly to kill a bunch of channels. There were a lot of creators that, rightly or wrongly, were like, “Oh my God, you just pulled the plug on my channel.” This is without any warning or explanation, really. They get an email that says, “Your channel has been removed,” or, “Your channel is no longer able to run ads.” There are countless stories about that.
, is effectively the number two at YouTube. I can’t remember his exact phrase, but my understanding was that they looked at the number that would be around where people made a living wage. It’s basically, “Here is the amount where people start to become financially dependent on YouTube,” which is really fascinating.When they switched to watch time, they were like, “Maybe another metric we could have is we could start to prioritize videos where creators make six figures a year.
That is actually one of the longest-running jokes on the show. Every YouTube creator reaches a point in their YouTube career where they make a video about how mad they are at YouTube. Hank Green is a perfect example. He’s not huge compared to others subscriber-wise, but Hank Green is trusted by creators. He is ad-safe and a voice of moral authority on the platform. I know he has the ear of the executives there. How influential that ear is though, I don’t know. I think you could certainly argue that they are much more responsive to creators now because of TikTok. New competition forces them to be more attentive and responsive to creators more than anything else.
The Reply Girls phenomenon is a good early example. I don’t know if anyone in the audience remembers this, but this was in 2011. I think it was when YouTube had passed over more of their feed to algorithmic curation, and these were largely women that had sorted out a way to game the system in a hacking genius way. They were called hackers. I believe there has been reporting that they were doxxed and threatened, which is a whole separate thread about YouTube’s problem in dealing with women.
That was the epiphany for the YouTube folks that were planning this. The leadership was like, “We need something that will make our boat go faster. Watch time will be it.” We talked about this a little bit with YouTube, Google. Watch time is very antithetical to Google’s business.I can hear the Yelp alarm clocks going. Google was like, “We want to get you off somewhere into the web, preferably a place that paid us for advertising.” YouTube was like, “No, we want people to linger around.
Yes. They said the first YouTube video was a short. It was like, “Guys, the first four years of YouTube was a short.” Yes, one of the many delightful ironies of the company. A lot of it is trying to control this very uncontrollable thing. One really interesting example in the book is there have been multiple times where LGBTQ creators get demonetized for discussing words like “sex,” “lesbian,” and “gay.” Even more awful were the anti-gay therapy ads that were running on their channels. People inside YouTube were like, “We do not want this. We did not intend to do this. We are trying to fix it as quickly as possible.
That’s fair. I think they felt that most acutely during that big Elsagate moment. That was a really powerful example of a trend taking off on the platform and employees watching these videos like, “We don’t want this trend to take off on the platform, and yet.
Content ID is shifted to robots and I think that works out pretty well. Aside from a few complaints a year, they are very happy with that tradeoff, with YouTubers complaining about copyright or content ID versus the extreme financial success and lack of lawsuits that content ID brings. It is still a Google company, and Google’s DNA is like, “Whenever we can do machine learning at scale, we are going to do it.
I think there were times during the Trump era, when they were trying to – and forgive the term — lean in on this a bit, where YouTube was like, “Well, we are the only social network run by a woman. That’s a great opportunity for us.” I talk about the reasons why they were really timid making these steps around the issues of gender equality and racial justice. After George Floyd, they started a fund and made a big push for that like all companies did.