THE sheer scale of YouTube is inescapable. The site is the world’s biggest video-sharing platform, a veritable Alexandrian library for the digital 21st century and a de facto search engine for billions of people worldwide.
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Its position in our lives is all the more extraordinary when you consider its age: if YouTube were a person, it would be unable to drive in many countries, and still couldn’t legally drink in the UK, US and Australia.
In Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube’s chaotic rise to world domination, Mark Bergen takes on a big task.
He peels back the public relations spin that Alphabet – the parent company of YouTube and Google – promotes about its platform, and shows the scrappy ascent of a site that started out as a place for funny home videos but is now a former of public taste, with an influence that can help presidents into power and fuel waves of rebellion worldwide.
It is a riveting read, taking us behind the scenes of the platform’s rise from nothing to its purchase by Google, and inside the minds of the flawed, often in-over-their-heads people who created corporate global policy on the hoof.
We see pool parties with executives, tense meetings with advertisers and text messages and emails pinging back and forth as YouTube lurches from crisis to crisis.
For anyone really wanting to know how YouTube came to be so dominant, the book is a must-read, unparalleled in its access to the inner thoughts and workings of the people and departments that dictated what content can be seen and what can’t.
The book is marketed as the definitive account of YouTube, so I should declare an interest here. I have also written a book on YouTube, published three years ago. Bergen clearly had even more access than I did, as he delves far deeper into the inner machinations of the video giant’s operations, giving unprecedented, enlightening insight into how major decisions were made.
For example, we learn more about the 2017 “adpocalypse”, where major advertisers pulled their cash from YouTube over concerns that their products were being shown alongside unsavoury videos. This cost the site $2 billion in revenue – alongside a $26 billion hit to its share price.
Then there are revelations about how YouTube reprimanded some of its biggest stars, PewDiePie and Logan Paul, on calls after major controversies.
Yet that focus on being a fly on the wall during the rise of YouTube and throughout some of its biggest challenges has its costs. For example, it means there is less space devoted to bigger questions about the always-online world of creators, and the impact a diet made up of more YouTube than mainstream media has on society.
The effects are often hinted at, however, through clever devices. For instance, Claire Stapleton, who became known as the bard of Google for her picaresque internal missives, acts as a sort of Greek chorus throughout the book.
Her increasing unease at YouTube’s power and her own position in an ever more corporate company aren’t always elucidated fully. Instead, the book recounts how Stapleton asked herself the deeper question: is YouTube actually net negative or net positive for society?
She never fully reaches a conclusion – nor, really, can we. By focusing so much on the business, Bergen sometimes ducks those deeper questions.
Nonetheless, it is a vital, necessary, readable book if we are to understand how YouTube suffused our society, and to learn about the psychodramas of some of those who helped make this happen.
Chris Stokel-Walker is a writer based in Newcastle, UK
