From startup to pop culture conqueror
YouTube offers the ‘ ultimate reality TV’ — slices of real people’s real lives
It’s a fact easily forgotten, in light of all the fame and the folly that’s followed. But before Justin Bieber was a tabloid fixture, a Calvin Klein model and a teen cult leader, he was a tiny, backlit figure swaying in front of a cinder- block wall, singing Ne- Yo’s So Sick in a pre- pubescent tenor.
It was a clip shot at a local singing competition in Stratford, Ont., where Bieber — then 12 — placed third. When his mother uploaded it to YouTube in January 2007 to share with family members outside of Stratford, she likely didn’t imagine that, eight years later, the fuzzy, hand- held video would have 7.3 million views. Or that it would catch the attention of Bieber’s now- manager, Scooter Braun. Or that, in the future, Bieber’s meticulously orchestrated YouTube videos would be shot by teams of highly- paid professionals.
In many ways, the narrative of Justin Bieber — arguably one of YouTube’s original mainstream stars — is also the story of YouTube itself. The massive videosharing site turned 10 years old Saturday, which almost passes for old age on the Internet. And yet, for much of its history, YouTube was the upstart, the disrupter, the 12- year- old kid just revving to conquer the pop culture machine.
“That’s what we’re all about,” co- founder Chad Hurley said in 2005. “We’re the ultimate reality TV.”
Of course, at the time, Hurley meant “reality TV” in its most literal sense: actual people, filming often- mundane dispatches from their actual lives.
When Hurley and his co- founders registered the YouTube. com domain name above a pizza shop in California in February 2005, such a concept was actually, well, pretty much unheard of.
The Internet video landscape, pre- YouTube, was like a dank, primordial plasma, virtually in- accessible to the average web user. Sure, there were a handful of other small- time video startups, most of them long gone today.
And there was a class of savvy users who owned the servers and the bandwidth required to host video on their personal websites, a technically difficult — and potentially expensive — endeavour.
In fact, pressed to name one viral video that appeared before the dawn of YouTube, it’s likely most people could only manage Numa Numa — the gloriously simple, unscripted webcam clip of a guy named Gary dancing to a Romanian pop song, which appeared online in December 2004. That clip has since, naturally, migrated to YouTube, where it’s been watched 56 million times.
Tech- heads had an inkling that online video could be big, of course. Blogs were booming. Social networks like MySpace and Facebook, then a year old, were gaining steady steam.
Google was, accordingly, working on its own video product, a thing aptly called Google Video, that promised to bring all the polish of TV to your computer screen. Google Video would let plebeians upload content provided they download Google’s proprietary file- transfer software, submit a form’s worth of content about the video, and wait for moderators to approve it.
YouTube had a way better idea: a video site that anyone and everyone could use. Appropriately, the first video ever uploaded to the site, on April 23, 2005, was a 19- second clip of baby- faced YouTube co- founder Jawed Karim standing in front of the elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo.
“All right, here we are, in front of the elephants,” he says. “The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks. And that’s cool. And that’s pretty much all there is to say.”
There it was: The ultimate reality TV. Life in all its unscripted, pedestrian honesty.