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Like, Comment, Subscribe: How YouTube Drives Google's Dominance and Controls Our Culture
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About This Book
The definitive, deeply reported account of YouTube, the company that upended media, culture, industry, and democracy--by a leading tech journalist Across the world, people watch over a billion hours of video on YouTube every day. The sheer amount of video produced there is beyond comprehension. Every minute, over five hundred hours of footage are uploaded to the site, the equivalent of eighty-two years of video added a day. That anyone can easily access any minute of this footage--and the trillion minutes more already on YouTube--is a technical feat unmatched in the history of computing. Everyone knows YouTube. And yet virtually no one knows how it works. Like, Comment, Subscribe is the first book to explain exactly how YouTube's technology and business evolved, how it works, and how it helped Google grow to unimaginable power, a narrative told through the people who created YouTube and the Google engineers and chiefs who took it over. It's the story of an industry run amok, and of how corporate greed resulted in the unraveling of truth, the spread of violence, and the corruption of the internet, all for the sake of profit. Mark Bergen, the top Google reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek, might know Google better than any other reporter in Silicon Valley, having broken numerous stories about YouTube's and Google's business and scandals. His deep access within the companies makes Like, Comment, Subscribe a thrilling, character-driven story of technological and business ingenuity and the hubris that undermined it.
Reviews
"...with Karim's pixelated smirk, begins Mark Bergen's fascinating Like, Comment, Subscribe, an account of the company's journey from its humble roots, thrown together in a garage by two college dropouts and a graphic designer, to its world-conquering present — last year it hoovered up $28 billion in revenue...On the surface, YouTube's story is one of astonishing success: snapped up by Google for $1.65 billion in October 2006, dishing out ad money to more than three million "creators" by April 2012, and today racking up 2.6 billion monthly users around the world...Behind the scenes, though, its journey reads like a two-decade game of Whac-a-Mole with the company trying to suppress crisis after crisis: the $1 billion lawsuit launched by Viacom over copyright infringement; the proliferation of conspiracy theory channels; the frequent appearance of porn in children's videos; and the constant gaffes of some of the channel's biggest stars."
"A tech journalist traces how YouTube works—or fails to...Bloomberg reporter Bergen seeks to bring the behemoth into the light...Bergen mostly keeps the story straight, but any account of the company is going to be a tale of barely controlled disarray...That is part of YouTube's attraction—for better or worse...Powerful insight into a ubiquitous yet still shadowy company."
"Bergen offers a revealing look at how YouTube has struggled with that growth ..."
"Despite its cultural ubiquity, most people know nothing about what goes on at YouTube, writes Bloomberg technology reporter Bergen in his intriguing debut...He charts the company's history, starting with its founding in 2005 by graphic designer Chad Hurley and his programmer friends Jawed Karim and Steve Chen, at a moment when entertainment was shifting from broadcast TV to reality show and eventually MySpace...And the idiosyncratic service has ended up as a microcosm of its own, he writes: 'In a little over a decade, YouTube had evolved..."
"Bergen avoids this trap ..."
"In extensive, and sometimes overlong, detail Bergen shows how it was done."
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