How do I love thee, YouTube, let me count the video clips. On your third birthday, I’ve decided to reveal my unhealthy obsession with YouTube and the treasure troves I uncover daily. But how can the online-video leader progress even further in 2009?
Dear YouTube:
Happy birthday, good friend. I understand in December 2005 you were officially launched by your parents, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. It’s been a long time coming, but my how you’ve grown! From a buzzword to a verb (“did you YouTube last night’s show?”) to the second largest search engine after Google. You used to be all about cartoon clips and silly karaoke songs; but you’ve matured into a grown-up portal full of stunning short films, presidential addresses, and protest footage.
My spare time thanks you, YouTube. Before you edged into my life, I committed such heinous acts as watching bad TV shows like According to Jim. I read Dean Koontz books. I ate too many Maltesers. Boring stuff. But since your entry into my digital recreation time, I’ve learned oh so much about the world: from the science behind Mentos-Pepsi experiments to the mind-blowing insanity of break-dancing to the art behind fast food fighting each other.
But you didn’t stop there. You corralled my eyeballs by presenting old-school music videos (oh Guns n’ Roses, what happened?), to fan-made sports highlights, to trailers for films I’m dying to see. I used to read books; what happened?
It’s obvious you’ve developed into something beyond our expectations. I hear 13 hours of new video are uploaded to you every minute. I hear your bandwidth costs are estimated at $1 million a day. You are massive, and you have to be regulated, but it’s what we’ve come to expect from such an unwieldy beast. After all, copyright criminals love to seed your site with pirated films and TV shows; understandable that you need to keep the integrity of your content. In fact, that’s what I love and hate about you.
Even though I might expect to see the new Office on YouTube, I realize you aren’t the site for full-length shows on major networks. Not yet at least. Instead, we are treated to YouTube-only series bursting with tight dialogue and impressive production quality: Street Fighter The Later Years, God Inc or Jon Lajoie music videos.
Most importantly, YouTube, you give a voice to the voiceless. You allow grandmothers to rant to an audience, you give kids a chance to riff guitar links on screen, and you turn activist messages into rallying cries. Within three years, you have become the ultimate town square, the quintessential megaphone.
If there’s any recent sign of true maturity, look no further than your first real “live” concert. You glowingly described it as a “a celebration of the vibrant communities that exist on the site including bedroom vloggers, budding creatives, underground athletes, world-famous musicians, gut-busting comedians and more.” Maybe so, but it was a watershed moment for Google’s pet project; after all, now you are hosting live concerts and spotlighting your homegrown stars on a Net stage many never thought possible three years ago. You have made heroes out of zeroes. I am sure many rising creatives would like to kiss your hand in thanks.
So as you celebrate three years in existence, sucking at the glass teat of online supremacy, I proffer a challenge: to elevate beyond your own borders to become the online home for more citizen media projects, for more original films, for even more live concerts. Don’t wallow in your own fame; don’t merely respond to corporate takedown notices and ad placement strategies. Continue to give us video geeks the content that keep us red-eyed past our internal deadline. Realize your fans are sitting and waiting to see what you’ll do next, because we’ve been witness to the best upgrades and innovation to come from your labs. And we want to see how YouTube will progress to become an even deeper obsession for those of us who can’t get enough of broadcast news bloopers.
What’s your favourite YouTube video from the past three years? Post links in the comment section!
