9781422277393

T he data is in and the results are clear—people spend a lot of time on YouTube: more than one billion hours per day, to be exact, when you add up the content watched by viewers all over the world. The fact that four hundred hours of video are uploaded every minute means there’s no shortage of clips to choose from. As of the end of 2017, YouTube is available in 88 countries and 76 languages. Its one billion active users—roughly one-third of everyone on the internet— make it the world’s second-most popular site after that of its owner, Google. What’s amazing about all of this is that YouTube was never intended to be such a massive platform, and one that now reaches some audiences more successfully than cable television. When site cofounder Jawed Karim uploaded the first YouTube video, a nineteen-second snippet of him at the San Diego Zoo, he probably had no idea what was to come: millions of home videographers creating, sharing, and commenting on each other’s posts, plus millions more professional filmmakers, advertisers, and pro- duction companies adding new stuff every day. It was a tremendous leap from the original idea for the site, which was to give friends and family a place to swap videos on an intimate scale. What makes YouTube’s technology so unique is its ability to “translate” all sorts of video languages into a single format that everyone can access. This means that vid- eos coming from different computers, phones, and cameras all over the world can be viewed easily by anyone once they’re uploaded to the site. Before this innovation, sending and receiving video files was a complicated process. YouTube has redefined the way we communicate visually, allowing us to document stories in our local com- munities, create “how-to” films that show how to tackle different tasks, and explore

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