Youtube's Slogan is a Contradiction

  HERE'S AN IDEA:

Youtube's full of crap.

YouTube is a video-sharing platform that was created by three dudes who used to work at Paypal: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim.  I don't blame them for wanting to tackle a project together after working at Paypal – could you imagine how boring and soul-sucking a job at the Paypal offices would be?  One fine day in 2005, these guys with the most exciting job in the world attended a party. Well, two of them did, at least – poor Jawed didn't get to go. However, his two pals had him covered: Chad and Steve taped a video of things happening at their little shindig and were going to email the file to Jawed so he could indulge enviously in their frantic partying addictions activities.  They hit a bit of a problem, though: Jawed was having problems watching the videos.

AND A STAR WAS BORN....The elephants, I mean.

The group of party-goers started having a discussion about how much easier sharing stories through video would be if anyone could just put them on the Internet.  They knew, though, that not anyone could figure out the programming behind hosting their own videos, so they decided to work on developing a website where people could upload a video linked to their account, and the software would do the rest. And, thus, YouTube was born!  The first video ever uploaded to the site, Me at the Zoo, is still on YouTube for viewing to this day.

The website started out as a humble video-sharing site that picked up fairly quickly, gaining tens of thousands of new users in just a couple months.  It was first released as a public beta, meaning the software and code was still being ironed out for perfection, but was complete enough to be operated by potential users.  They incorporated user-made video pages, called "channels," where users could decorate their own account page to represent the content they uploaded, be it home videos, song covers, or a guy stupid enough to try diving into ice.  The website became more and more heavily-populated by the end of the year, YouTube signed onto a business partnership with Google in 2006, and the rest is history we lived through and made happen.

This is the last straw, Google! Mark my words!

That's right, we really made it happen.  Almost all of YouTube's content is in the form of original, user-generated entertainment for the world to enjoy – it is a hub of information, sharing, and performance that anyone from anywhere can enjoy in mere seconds. That is crazy. If you were to tell this to the average person in 1990, he'd think you were crazy or from some distant future he would never live to see.  And yet here that person would be, living the reality of what you spoke of, only 20 years later. It's a mammoth innovation in global communication and expression, and it all started with YouTube's short, sweet, and revolutionary slogan: "Broadcast Yourself."

On the other hand, however, many dedicated YouTubers who actively participate in the community would unanimously agree YouTube is starting to fall south.  That's not to say the company is losing money or falling under – financially, it's quite the opposite.  People would argue the community and website itself is straying away from the founders' initial vision.  You could say their slogan doesn't really mean much anymore.  We still upload videos and can broadcast ourselves, to put it simply, but just let me explain a few points throughout the website's history, and you'll see what I'm getting at.


DESIGN:

YouTube's initial design was left pretty much the same until just a couple months ago.  Though the visual aesthetic of the website evolved and looked more polished as the years went on, the layout and organization of buttons, tabs, and columns stayed the same for almost seven years.  It was interrupted this year when YouTube integrated Google+ into the YouTube system (obviously Google's decision, not YouTube's), and in turn renovated the entire layout of YouTube's webpages. Here are some pictures to provide a visual aid (click the image for a full-size scale):

2005

2006

2010

2011

Notice which way the design for YouTube went?  It started leaning more toward recommended video and what the  viewer might find interesting to watch. The site also evolved to categorize videos based on topic and also gained a search bar.  YouTube evolved to keep you glued to that screen and distract you for as long as it can milk out of you.  That's not something to completely hose a website down for – bandwidth is a monster with YouTube, so they need that money.

What throws off people off about the design of the website is how often the channel page's design changes (almost annually), and how each new design template takes more and more away from the user's freedom of customization for their page.  What was once a template with fully-customized colours, fonts, and tab layouts is now to be dumbed down to a blank white page with a thumbnail grid and a banner at the top of the user's channel that is customizable.  How do you "Broadcast Yourself" when your page of content looks the exact same as everyone else's?

It could be debated good content will speak for itself, and that promising entertainment will bring in viewers for your content, not a fancy-looking channel page.  You have to consider, though, that advertising and publicity is crucial to any sort of business-like model.  Would you imagine the outrage from corporations doing TV commercials if major networks made it mandatory for every commercial to follow a specific camera angle, a set that couldn't be changed, and a roster of actors that only they could provide?  That restricts any possibility of standing out and making your commercial truly unique; it would be alienating and dangerous to the advertising market. YouTube is putting this exact kind of situation into effect in June, and it's really going to hurt them.


COMPETITION:

You must be thinking, what could be wrong with online competition among strangers, let alone how a website where you share videos could result in intense competition.  The truth is, when anyone under the age of 18 signs up for a YouTube account, all that kid has spinning through his head is a bunch of numbers.  What kind of numbers would they be stuffing their head with?  Oh, the best kind – the number of subscribers they're going to have, the millions of views they are obviously going to get, the number of "upvotes" they'll receive on their snappy, intelligent comments, and probably the number of "Sub4sub" channels they're going to visit. The YouTube community, to say the least, may be misdirected in why they're partaking in the website's community.

A typical argument on Youtube.

Users are hungry for subscribers – people who "subscribe" to a channel to receive notifications of new content instantly – that they resort to methods of cheating the system. They visit "sub4sub" channels, which are accounts people create that will subscribe to whomever subscribes to them.  This sounds like a generally nice gesture, but there must be millions of sub4sub channels on YouTube right now, and even more people taking advantage of empty subscribers who don't actually watch their content.  It's a dishonest and disgraceful way of trying to look well-known in the community.

The competition for subscribers, views, and being the next big thing easily enthralls many users on the site. An element of competition is always a good thing in all you do; competition is the adrenaline that drives you to always do your best and aim for improvement. However, it's easy to see that using workarounds within the guidelines of a given system isn't competition in the motivational sense - cheating is dishonest and it's not going to enrich your experience as much as hard work and dedication will. There's our lesson for the day, kiddies.


PARTNERSHIP:

Just a little disclaimer: I am a YouTube partner myself, so when I write about this, I have no intention on sounding like a hypocrite.  I speak on this issue the way I do because I have a realistic perspective on the program.  To briefly define it, the YouTube Partnership Program is when Google will allow certain users to enable advertisements on their videos to gain revenue. That's right, you can make money just by uploading videos onto YouTube.  In most cases it's not a large sum; most partners on YouTube don't even make enough money to pay for rent in an apartment, but it's usually a welcomed amount of pocket change for doing something you're passionate about. This is my scenario, to summarize.

...$2.6 million/year, folks. Not even kidding.

Many YouTube partners, however – the big ones – are making monstrous amounts of money from YouTube, and yes, that does sound like a pretty sweet gig, and that's probably because it is.  But let me level with you for a second, reader – is it really worth quitting a day job for?  I wouldn't get so comfortable with a partnership that I'd quit a day job just because I'm making enough income.  To make my reasoning short, let me just say Google's issued payments don't get issued into government taxes at all. For the people making a lot of money off of the service, that's hurting the economy and inflating dollar value a little at a time, if my logic is correct. Plus, since there's no taxes retracted from Google's payments, there are no pension rates on your income, either. Congrats, Anthony Padilla.When the stock market inevitably crashes again in our lifetime, you're going to become old, poor, and homeless because you have no retirement plan.

Let me also iterate that, since partnership channels are what enable ads on videos, and therefore make YouTube the most money, partners receive the most service and attention from YouTube.  Oh, isn't that nice?  YouTube thanks the large crowds of dedicated creative minds of their website by building new features completely around the minority demographic of partnered channels, building YouTube into a divided community where the popular get more popular, and the normal users stay obscure.  YouTube doesn't want you to "Broadcast Yourself" anymore, they're more interested in: "Broadcast the people who will give us Excess cash because Google told us to." Ah, I love it when community-driven websites of discussion and creativity fall into the trap of trusting corporations.


SO...IN CONCLUSION:

To make one thing clear that closes my points nicely: YouTube dropped its slogan in the new year.  It seems even the company agrees with me.  The slogan used to mean something – it was a cultural centre that let the world come together and share ideas.  By everyone choosing to broadcast themselves, YouTube exploded with popularity and revealed great videos that have made people laugh, cry, smile, and think.  The website isn't really interested in that anymore.

Give me Youtube or give me DEATH!

I blame Google for corrupting YouTube. Google's trying so hard to expand its brand. I guarantee, before Google developed Google Plus, they probably tried to buy out a trending social service first. In fact, Google did try to buy Twitter for $4 billion, but it never went through because, y'know, ol' Costolo is no corporate slouch.  It would've saved Google development money for their software to buy a service like Twitter or Facebook, as well as deleting any competition for being "the best online service."

It was a bad idea for YouTube to agree to such a thing; they really had a community that loved to advance itself as an entity.  Now all people want to do is put minimal effort into creating content, and then cross their fingers and hope they can start to rake in stacks of money from the crap they're conceiving.  You can blame lazy or uninspired users for this, but ultimately you can blame Google for encouraging this element of numerical value to the YouTube experience – it always has to come down to numbers, right? Ugh, I hate math and I hate the new YouTube.

Soooo...I wonder what's going to happen to Google Video?