CHAPTER NINE
YouTube A Delightsome Application
YouTube’s office is filled with its history. Inside the San Bruno, California, headquarters, about 45 minutes from the Googleplex in Mountain View, there’s a YouTube video on every screen. Over here, the SmarterEveryDay guys talk about the brain-bending backwards bicycle. Over there, Rick Astley promises he’s never gonna let you down. (YouTube’s employees work in a semi-permanent state of RickRoll.) On a table in one of the office’s many kitchens, there’s a pile of remotes for Google TV devices underneath a handwritten “FREE” sign.
And of course, the red play button is everywhere you look: big doorways, small desk ornaments. The conference rooms are named after YouTube phenomena: Double Rainbow, It’s a Trap, Dos Equis Guy, and on and on and on.
Inside the Lolcats conference room, VP of product management Matthew Glotzbach is describing the future of YouTube. He envisions an app so good, an algorithm so perfect, that it knows exactly what you want to watch at any given time. You wake up in the morning and catch up on the news while you get ready. Then, throughout the day, YouTube shows you shorter videos when you’re waiting in line or in the bathroom: maybe some gadget reviews, or the best Jimmy Fallon bit you missed last night. At night, you come home, and use Chromecast to watch a movie or an episode of Video Game High School on your TV. YouTube wants to be more than a search engine for video. It wants to be the future, a perfect blend of TV and the internet, where everything is on demand but there’s always something on.
A decade after its debut, YouTube is a behemoth. It’s become the place for video online. Three hundred hours of video are uploaded every minute, and it has well over a billion users worldwide. It’s spawned a crop of celebrities, real honest-to-goodness famous people. It’s by some measures the world’s second-largest search engine. And it has pioneered entirely new ways of creating and consuming video. Video was ascendant in the last decade, and it’s going to be inescapable in the next one.
YouTube can’t relax, though. Not yet, not ever. New challengers—everyone from Facebook and Snapchat to Vimeo and Vessel—are eyeing its talent and ready to poach its viewers. Absolutely everyone is coming for its advertisers, who have untold billions to spend and serious demands about where it goes. YouTube needs to prove it can turn impossibly huge view counts into actual, real profit.
The plan? Make sure everyone on the planet can get online, and on YouTube. They’re working with carriers and ISPs to figure out how to stream to anyone no matter what their connection looks like. Then, get so good at showing them videos they like that they’ll never want to turn off. That requires teaching their computers what’s inside your videos, what videos you want to see, and what formats and video types are coming next. The video industry moves fast, and YouTube has to stay faster.
Simple, right?
Just Press Play
Buffering is the dirtiest word at YouTube. The people who work there say it a lot, always with a sort of cringing, pained look. It’s like they’re remembering a bad breakup or just woke up to a crushing hangover.
“There was some stat that we used to have that was like, if the YouTube buffer symbol was a webpage, it would be the third most popular website in the world,” Glotzbach says. Then he hastily adds: “Not now, though!”
That’s been the mission since even before Google bought YouTube. You’ve probably seen the first video, from January 2005, of “me at the zoo.” This is YouTube’s “just setting up my twttr” moment, and has become a key part of the mythology. You probably also remember the video a year later, when Chad Hurley and Steve Chen announced they’d sold to Google for $1.65 billion. YouTube grew furiously, giving people an easy way to upload and share video that previously would’ve resided only on Handycams and Mini-DVs, never to be seen by anyone. It wasn’t complicated or powerful—that was the whole point.
With Google, YouTube hit the big time. The acquisition was an obvious one; the two companies desperately needed each other. “Google Books was going on at the time, ingesting all the books,” says YouTube’s VP of engineering John Harding, who was one of the first Google Video employees. “And we had said, what would it take to have all the video?” Google built the tech for Google Video, scaled it to infinity, and had absolutely no idea what to do with it. Meanwhile, Harding remembers, “YouTube had a very fantastic user product.” It made it easy for people to upload their own video, and its popularity exploded from the get-go. But YouTube didn’t know how to scale; it was buckling under its own success. It was a perfect marriage, even if Google Video did live on in awkward redundancy for a few more years.