The way to the rise of the content aircraft carrier YouTube

YouTube from the initial obscurity to now the mainstream foreign video channels, do you know its past life and this life? Do you understand how it developed to its present head position? From the point of view of a mobile Internet practitioner, the author combs the "road to the rise of the content aircraft carrier" in detail and shares it with you.

If you ask a domestic user on which platforms they usually watch video content, the answer will most likely be "Aiyou Teng" (the acronym of iqiyi, Youku Video and Tencent Video) plus a bilibili.

But if you ask foreign users the same question, the vast majority of people have only one YouTube.

As the absolute leader in today's video industry, YouTube currently has more than 2 billion monthly active users, 1 billion hours of viewing time per day, and total revenue of more than $15 billion in 2019.

If you want to do sea content, it is necessary to study and learn YouTube.

First, starting from a party about how YouTube was founded, there is a popular story in the Internet circle in the United States: in January 2005, two young men, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, attended a private party in San Francisco.

Everyone had a good time at the party and took out their mobile phones to take pictures of the scene, but after filming, they found it difficult to share these videos with their other friends.

At that time, the most popular method of information transmission was "e-mail", but the video sent through Email not only needed to be compressed in size, but also took several hours to upload and download.

This dilemma led the two creative young people to come up with the idea of making their own product to solve the problem.

The above story is quite popular, but when the reporter asked the founding team for confirmation, there was no clear reply.

A more plausible theory is that, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen came up with the idea of a video sharing site in 2004 after JanetJackson's shirt was ripped off by Justin Timberlake during the 38th Super Bowl halftime show, exposing Janet's breasts for half a second, which caused a great deal of controversy and became the hot news of the year.

2.

A magical payment tool Paypal when it comes to the founding team of YouTube, you have to mention another American company-Paypal.

In a sense, the expression that there is no Paypal without YouTube, sounds a bit exaggerated, but it is also logically true.

Three founders of YouTubeChad Hurley, Steve Chen and later joined Jawed Karim were all early employees of Paypal, and all accumulated rich wealth after the rapid growth of Paypal, which provided them with the start-up capital to start YouTube.

In fact, in addition to the founders, YouTube's early employees also had a large number of Paypal staff, who were deeply influenced by Paypal culture.

Paypal may be 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%.

You must have heard of its founder (one), who is the current president of the famous Elon Musk (Tesla).

Paypal is a highly creative company that encourages employees to keep challenging.

During job interviews, they ask if they will start their own business in the future, and give high ratings to those who give the affirmative answer.

The culture of Paypal has trained a number of challenging employees, many of whom have set up their own companies after leaving Paypal, including 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) in addition to YouTube.

Third, starting 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, after the launch, the development was not smooth, and they encountered the problems that most video platforms will encounter: first, there is a lack of sufficient content on the website, and the total amount of videos can only support a user to watch for dozens of minutes.

After watching, you can only repeat it over and over again.

In addition, the content itself does not support any retrieval, but can only be played to the user in a given order for viewing.

The founders did not think clearly about the direction of YouTube, when they hoped to build YouTube into a "video dating site" that would allow both men and women to record and upload videos about themselves, and launched a campaign: each female user could get $20 for uploading a video about himself.

However, 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 an extremely simple video: an 18-second video of an elephant walking in a zoo.

But this video isNow it's one of the most famous videos of all time.

A video platform has been set up, but the lack of continuous content input has become the most embarrassing thing, so how to solve this problem? YouTube's strategy is to pirate TV content.

Let's first review the background of the times.

2005 is still an era when traditional media are king.

Television is the most important channel for people to get information.

A large number of high-quality programs and popular movies are broadcast in a fixed period of time on major channels.

At this time, although the Internet as a new medium also began to enter thousands of households, but high-quality original content is relatively rare.

After determining the strategy for pirated TV content, YouTube quickly created a group of "content porters" who recorded the content on the TV, simply edited it and uploaded it to YouTube, so that the wonderful content could be redistributed on the Internet.

As a new medium, the Internet breaks through the restrictions of time and region, and makes a lot of pirated content more powerful after uploading than in traditional media.

The most typical of these shows is Lazy Sunday, which is about the comedian group The Lonely Island on its way to the cinema to see the Legend of Narnia on a weekend.

The video has garnered 5 million views within days of YouTube uploading, and many users who have never heard of YouTube are beginning to learn about the platform.

From the point of view of the general public, pirated videos are definitely not in line with the laws and regulations of the "undecent" practice, but also brought a lot of litigation problems to the YouTube at that time.

However, this "grey approach" makes YouTube not only enrich the content of the platform in a short period of time, but also quickly access to traffic, standing out among many competitors.

Reminiscent of the short video platforms that have sprung up in China in the past two years, whether it is "Watermelon" or "Volcano", they all adopt a similar approach, cutting high-quality content and uploading it in batches with exaggerated headlines, and the platform itself acquiesced in this practice.

So, at its root, YouTube rose through pirated content, but that didn't stop it from complying with and growing into a content empire.

Fourth, the most successful content consumption acquisition with a large amount of pirated content, YouTube has accumulated nearly 50 million users in less than a year, this rate of development is almost crazy.

However, it also brought growing pains, when YouTube had not yet established a clear business model, and the large amount of broadband fees generated by video kept the startup struggling to make ends meet.

On the other hand, a large number of pirated content caused the dissatisfaction of many traditional TV media, and the ensuing lawsuits also made YouTUbe is a little overwhelming.

Although YouTube received a multimillion-dollar investment from Sequoia Capital in November 2005, it didn't take long for the money to be used up.

By the beginning of 2006, there was media speculation that YouTube alone would cost millions of dollars per month.

At the same time, the rapid growth of YouTube has attracted the attention of Internet giants.

In October 2016, after a period of negotiations, Google spent a whopping $1.

65 billion to buy YouTube, when YouTube had only 65 employees.

The price offered by Google surprised all people in the industry at that time.

Although YouTube is developing very rapidly, it seems that it has not yet seen a clear business model, and there are still some uncertainties in its development prospects.

But Google strongly recognizes the potential value of YouTube, the form of media from text to pictures, and then to video, Google believes that YouTube will be the darling of the next era of the mobile Internet.

In fact, Google's acquisition of YouTube also has some helpless colors.

Google, as a leader in the Internet industry, began to test online video as early as January 2005 and launched Google Video, several months earlier than YouTube.

However, the development of Google Video has always been lukewarm, first, because Google Video has high requirements for video quality, and users must upload high-resolution videos in order to pass the audit; second, due to the existence of Google identity, it is unlikely to obtain traffic through pirated videos, so its content richness is also much lower than that of YouTube.

At first, Google had a slightly disdainful attitude towards YouTube, but by 2006, YouTube had accounted for more than 50% of the online video market, far surpassing Google Video and its competitors at the same time.

At this time, Google also realized that the online video war was over and began to actively prepare for the acquisition of YouTube.

When it was acquired by Google, YouTube had many suitors, including Microsoft, Viacom and Yahoo.

But YouTube finally chose Google, from YouTube's point of view for the following reasons: first, Google promised YouTube full freedom.

Chad Hurley, the co-founder of YouTube, has said many times in public that he hopes that no matter what the circumstances, his companyCan remain independent.

Google clearly fully respects this, and even after the acquisition, YouTube retained its brand name and team commitment and still works in its office in San Bruno, California.

Second, in the background of the founder, YouTube and Google have a strong similarity.

They all began with the bold ideas of young geniuses, and they all experienced explosive growth and quickly became high-profile stars.

Third, Google, as the leader of search engine, has a huge flow pool and mature commercial ability, both of which are needed by the relatively immature YouTube.

After Google acquired YouTube, all the content on, Google Video was transferred to YouTube a few months later.

Content compliance and commercial pirated content brought a large number of users to YouTube at the initial stage, but this is not sustainable after all.

After being acquired by Google, YouTube began to focus on two problems: content compliance and gradual commercialization.

In the aspect of content compliance, on the one hand, YouTube cooperates with a large number of traditional TV media to obtain the corresponding content playback authorization, this strategy is very effective, and many traditional media have gained more influence through the Internet.

On the other hand, YouTube launched the Content ID system.

Content ID is a digital system that identifies and manages copyrighted content uploaded by users to YouTube.

It compares the new content uploaded by users with 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 proceeds go to the owner of the copyrighted music.

This is the judgment made by Content ID.

In terms of commercialization, YouTube has also made a bold attempt and launched the "partner Program" in May 2007: users will get a share of the revenue from the videos they upload.

This move has greatly stimulated the enthusiasm of ordinary users to upload videos, and began to make many people realize that hobbies can also become a profession, and tens of thousands of youtuber will be able to profit from YouTube by making videos in the coming years.

In July 2007, YouTube officially announced that it would add commercial ads to the video and began a full commercialization.

The first ad was a translucent banner ad that popped up at the bottom of the video for about 10 to 15 seconds.

YouTub, a subscription service, was launched in November 2014.

E-Red, through YouTube Red users can watch video content without advertising, and can watch paid movies and other content.

The service was upgraded to YouTube Premium in 2018.

In 2020, Google announced that the number of, YouTube Premium subscribers reached 20 million.

Sixth, after resolving the issues of content compliance, business model and recommendation algorithm in the dispute, YouTube after 2007 opened the road of global expansion, and all the data rose almost explosively.

Although in the process of rapid development, YouTube has been controversial for broadcasting racism, animal cruelty, public disasters and so on, and even caused a large-scale boycott by advertisers and was blocked by relevant departments in many countries (Brazil, Indonesia, Iran, Morocco, etc.

).

But it is undeniable that YouTube provides a benchmark and paradigm for the whole industry in many aspects, such as business model, long-tail recommendation, sorting algorithm, content control, image technology, product experience and so on.

And from the author's point of view of an ordinary user, YouTube has been sticking to its values and trying to do things better.

A typical example is: during this year's epidemic, there have been a large number of discriminatory comments and terms on YouTube about our country.

These videos have been marked as "yellow" by YouTube (controversial content), and the revenue of its publishers will be reduced by more than 90%.

In a subsequent interview with CNN, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said directly that anything different from the recommendations of the World Health Organization ((WHO)) in terms of the epidemic would be deleted from the platform.

Now that YouTube is 15 years old, as a super aircraft carrier in the global content field, YouTube will continue to move forward in the wind and rain, and as a worker in the sea industry, the author will continue to study and learn about 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 242011 6:20 AM GMT+8,JOHN PATRICK PULLEN "YouTube is a $15 billion-a-year business, Google reveals for the first time", Feb 32020, 4:24pm EST, Nick Statt, "The 22 Key Turning Points In The History Of YouTube", Dickey Feb 15, 2013, 10:01 PM columnist Master of Psychology, currently engaged in overseas Internet work.

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