YouTube from the original status of unknown to the current mainstream video channel abroad, do you know its past and present? Do you know how it developed to its current head status? The author of this article sorted out the "Road to the Rise of a Content Aircraft Carrier" from the perspective of a mobile Internet practitioner and shared with you.
If you ask a domestic user on which platforms they usually watch video content, the answer will most likely be "Aiyouten" (abbreviation for iQiyi, Youku Video, and Tencent Video) plus a bilibili. But if you ask foreign users the same question, the answer for most people is only one YouTube. As the absolute hegemon in the video field today, YouTube currently has more than 2 billion monthly active users, and the total daily viewing time of users is as high as 1 billion hours. The total revenue in 2019 exceeded 15 billion US dollars.
If you want to make sea content, you must research and learn YouTube.
1. Speaking from a gathering
about how YouTube was founded, there is a quite circulated story in the American Internet circle: In January 2005, two young people, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, participated in a meeting in San Francisco Private party. At the party, everyone had a great time and took out their phones to take pictures of the scene, but after the shooting, they found it difficult to share these videos with their other friends.
At that time, the most popular method of information transmission was "email", but the video sent via Email not only needed to be compressed in size, but the entire upload and download process also took several hours (Note: In 2005, broadband and 3G were not popular yet. The dilemma caused these two very creative young people to develop their own products to solve the problem.
The above story is quite popular, but when the reporter asked the founding team for verification, there was no clear reply. A more credible statement is that Chad Hurley and Steve Chen were in the 2004 US Super Bowl "Dew Point" (Janet Jackson’s shirt was torn off by Justin Timberlake during the 38th Super Bowl halftime performance, causing Janet’s The breasts were exposed for half a second through the broadcast. After the incident caused great controversy and became the hot news of the year), the idea of creating a video sharing website was born.
2. A magical payment tool Paypal
When it comes to the founding team of YouTube, one must mention another American company-Paypal. In a sense, there would be no YouTube without Paypal. This expression sounds a bit exaggerated, but it is logically true. The three founders of
YouTube, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who joined later, are all early employees of Paypal, and they have accumulated substantial wealth after the rapid growth of Paypal. These wealth provided them with the start-up capital to start YouTube. In fact, in addition to the founder of
, YouTube’s early employees also had a large number of Paypal employees, all of whom were deeply influenced by the Paypal culture.
Paypal may be relatively unfamiliar to domestic users, but in fact it is the largest online payment platform in Europe and the United States, with a market share of more than 56%. His founder (one of), you must have heard of it, is the famous Elon Musk (current Tes Pull the president).
Paypal is a very creative company that encourages employees to continue to challenge. They will ask candidates if they will start their own business in the future during the interview, and give a higher score to those who give affirmative answers. The culture of
Paypal has cultivated a group of employees who are brave enough to challenge. Many of them founded their own companies after leaving Paypal. In addition to YouTube, they also include Tesla (electric car manufacturer), LinkedIn (workplace social software), Palantir Technologies (big data analysis platform), SpaceX (aerospace manufacturer), Yelp (marketing platform) and Yammer (Enterprise Social Software) etc.
3. Drainage from pirated videos
Driven by the three creators Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, YouTube.com was officially launched on April 23, 2015. However, the development of
has not been smooth after it went online. They encountered problems that most video platforms would encounter: First, there is a lack of sufficient content on the website, and the total amount of videos can only support one user to watch for dozens of minutes. You can only repeat it over and over again. In addition, the content itself does not support any retrieval, and can only be played to users for viewing in a predetermined order. The founders of
did not think clearly about the direction of YouTube’s development. At that time, everyone wanted to turn YouTube into a "video dating site", which was to let both men and women record videos about themselves and upload them, and launched an event for this: Every woman Users upload a video about themselves and get 20 dollars. But after the launch of the event, it was found that no female users responded. During this period, Karim also invited his high school classmate Yakov Lapitsky to upload a video, the content is extremely simple: an 18-second video about elephants walking in the zoo. But this video is now one of the most well-known videos of all time.
A video platform was established, but the lack of continuous content input became the most embarrassing thing. How to solve this problem? The strategy given by
YouTube is: pirates TV content.
Let’s review the background of the times. In 2005, it was an era when traditional media was king. Television was the most important channel for people to obtain information. A large number of high-quality programs and popular movies were broadcast in fixed time periods on major channels. At this time, although the Internet, as an emerging medium, began to enter thousands of households, high-quality original content was relatively rare. After
determined the strategy of pirating TV content, a group of "content porters" quickly appeared on YouTube. They recorded the content on TV, and uploaded it to YouTube after simple editing, so that these wonderful content can be obtained on the Internet. Second spread. As a new medium, the Internet has broken through the limitations of time and region, making many pirated content uploaded to have a more powerful influence than traditional media. The most iconic program of
is "Lazy Sunday", which tells the story of the comedian group The Lonely Island on the way to the cinema to watch "The Chronicles of Narnia" on a weekend. This video received 5 million views within a few days after it was uploaded on YouTube, and many users who have never heard of YouTube have also begun to learn about this platform.
From the perspective of the general public, pirated videos must be regarded as an "illegitimate" practice that is not in compliance with the laws and regulations. It also caused many litigation problems for YouTube at that time. However, this "gray approach" has enabled YouTube not only to enrich the content of the platform, but also to obtain traffic quickly, making it stand out from many competitors.
is reminiscent of the short video platforms that have emerged in China in the past two years. Whether it’s "Watermelon" or "Volcano", it adopts a similar approach, cutting high-quality content and uploading them in batches with exaggerated titles. The platform itself also acquiesces to this approach.
So, from the root point of view, YouTube rose through pirated content, but this does not prevent it from complying with regulations and growing into a content empire.
4. The most successful acquisition of content consumption
Relying on massive amounts of pirated content, YouTube has accumulated nearly 50 million users in less than a year. This development speed is almost crazy.
However, this also brought growth troubles. At that time, YouTube had not yet established a clear business model, and the large amount of broadband fees generated by videos made this startup continue to make ends meet. On the other hand, a large amount of pirated content has caused dissatisfaction with many traditional TV media, and the ensuing lawsuits have also made YouTube somewhat difficult to fight.
Although YouTube received a multi-million dollar investment from Sequoia Capital in November 2005, it never happened.How long will the money be used up? By the beginning of 2006, some media speculated that YouTube's broadband fee alone would cost millions of dollars a month.
At the same time, YouTube’s rapid growth has also attracted the attention of Internet giants. In October 2016, after a period of negotiations, Google spent $1.65 billion to acquire YouTube at a astronomical price. At this time, YouTube had only 65 employees. . The price offered by Google at that time surprised everyone in the industry. Although YouTube has developed extremely fast, it seems that it has not yet seen a clear business model, and there are still some uncertainties in its development prospects. However, Google recognizes the potential value of YouTube very much. The forms of media range from text to pictures to videos. Google believes that YouTube will be the darling of the next era of mobile Internet.
In fact, Google’s acquisition of YouTube also has some helpless colors. As a leader in the Internet industry, Google began to test online video and launched Google Video as early as January 2005, a few days earlier than the establishment of YouTube. Months.
However, the development of Google Video has always been tepid. One is because Google Video has high requirements for video quality, and users must upload higher-resolution videos to pass the review; the other is because of the existence of Google’s identity. It is unlikely to obtain traffic through pirated videos, so the richness of content is much lower than that of YouTube.
The original Google has always had a slightly contemptuous attitude towards YouTube, but by 2006, YouTube accounted for more than 50% of the online video market share, far surpassing Google Video and other competitors in the same period.
At this time, Google has also realized that the online video war has come to an end, and has begun to actively prepare to acquire YouTube. When it was acquired by Google, YouTube had many suitors, including Microsoft, Viacom (American media giant) and Yahoo. But YouTube finally chose Google. From YouTube’s point of view, there are several reasons:
- First, Google promised to give YouTube full freedom. YouTube’s co-founder Chad Hurley has stated many times in public that he hopes whether it is in Under any circumstances, your company can remain independent. Google obviously fully respects this. Even after the acquisition, YouTube still retains its brand name and team commitment, and still works in its office in San Bruno, California.
- Second is in the background of the founder, YouTube and Google have a strong similarity. Both of them were born from the bold ideas of young talents, and they all experienced explosive growth, quickly becoming a star that attracts attention.
- Third is Google as the leader of the search engine, with a huge traffic pool and mature commercialization capabilities, both of which are required by the relatively immature YouTube.
After Google acquired YouTube, all content on Google Video was transferred to YouTube a few months later.
5. Content compliance and commercialization
pirated content brought a massive number of users to YouTube in the early stage, but this is not sustainable after all. After being acquired by Google, YouTube began to focus on solving two problems: content compliance and Gradually commercialize.
In terms of content compliance, YouTube’s approach is to cooperate with a large number of traditional television media on the one hand to obtain corresponding content playback authorization. This strategy is very effective, and many traditional media have also been able to gain greater access through the Internet. Influence. On the other hand, YouTube introduced the Content ID system.
Content ID is a digital system used to identify and manage copyrighted content uploaded by users to YouTube, and it will transfer new content uploaded by usersCompare with the existing content in the Content ID database to determine whether the content infringes copyright (if you upload a video with copyrighted background music to YouTube, you will find that your income belongs to the copyrighted music owner , This is the judgment made by Content ID).
In terms of commercialization, YouTube has also begun a bold attempt, and launched the "Partner Program" in May 2007: users will get revenue sharing from the videos they upload. The
initiative greatly stimulated the enthusiasm of ordinary users to upload videos, and began to make many people realize that hobbies can also become a profession. In the next few years, tens of thousands of youtubers will be able to make videos through Ways to profit on YouTube.
In July 2007, YouTube officially announced the inclusion of commercial advertisements in the video, and began full commercialization. The first advertisement was a semi-transparent banner advertisement that popped up below the video and appeared for about 10 to 15 seconds.
launched a subscription service YouTube Red in November 2014, through which users can watch video content without ads, and can watch paid movies and other content. The service was upgraded to YouTube Premium in 2018. In 2020, Google announced that YouTube Premium has up to 20 million subscribers.
6. Moving forward in the dispute
After solving the content compliance, business model, recommendation algorithm and other issues, after 2007, YouTube started the path of full expansion worldwide, and all data are almost explosive. . Although
is in the process of rapid development, YouTube has also been controversial for broadcasting racism, animal cruelty, public disasters and other aspects. It even caused a large-scale boycott by advertisers and was blocked by relevant authorities in many countries (Brazil , Indonesia, Iran, Morocco, etc.).
However, it is undeniable that YouTube has provided benchmarks and paradigms for the entire industry in terms of business model, long-tail recommendations, ranking algorithms, content control, imaging technology, product experience, and many other aspects. And from the author's point of view as an ordinary user, YouTube has been sticking to its values and trying to do better. A typical example of
is: during the epidemic this year, a large number of discriminatory remarks and titles on YouTube appeared on YouTube. These videos were uniformly marked as "yellow label" (controversial content) by YouTube, and their publishers' earnings would decrease by 90% %the above. In a follow-up interview with CNN, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki directly stated that any content that differs from the recommendations of the World Health Organization (WHO) regarding the epidemic will be deleted from the platform.
YouTube is now fifteen years old. As a super aircraft carrier in the global content field, YouTube will continue to move forward in the wind and rain. As a worker in the overseas industry, I will continue to research and learn from it!
References:
- "A Decade Ago, Google Bought YouTube — and It Was the Best Tech Deal Ever", Oct 10, 2016, 8:30am EDT, Victor Luckerson
- "A Video Clip Goes Viral, and a TV Network Wants to Control It", Feb. 20, 2006, By John Biggs
- "How Vimeo became hipster YouTube", February 24, 2011 6:20 AM GMT+8, JOHN PATRICK PULLEN
- "YouTube is a $15 billion-a-year business, Google reveals for the first time", Feb 3, 2020, 4:24pm EST, Nick Statt,
- "The 22 Key Turning Points In The History Of YouTube", Dickey Feb 15, 2013, 10:01 PM
columnist
Wangzai No.9, WeChat Official account: Product Deep Web, everyone is a product manager columnist. Master of Psychology, currently engaged in overseas Internet work.
This article was originally published by everyone is a product manager. Without permission, it is prohibited to reprint
title image from Unsplash, based on CC0 protocol
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