Like, Comment, Subscribe - How YouTube Conquered the World

Informationen zum Autor Mark Bergen Klappentext The gripping inside story of YouTube, the company that upended media, culture, industry, and democracy—by a leading tech journalist Across the world, people watch more than a billion hours of video on YouTube every day. Every minute, more than five hundred additional hours of footage are uploaded to the site, a technical feat unmatched in the history of computing. YouTube invented the attention economy we all live in today, forever changing how people are entertained, informed, and paid online. Everyone knows YouTube. And yet virtually no one knows how it works. Like, Comment, Subscribe is the first book to reveal the riveting, behind-the-scenes account of YouTube’s technology and business, detailing how it helped Google, its parent company, achieve unimaginable power, a narrative told through the people who run YouTube and the famous stars born on its stage. It’s the story of a revolution in media and an industry run amok, how a devotion to a simple idea—let everyone broadcast online and make money doing so—unleashed an outrage and addiction machine that spun out of the company’s control and forever changed the world. Mark Bergen, a top technology reporter at Bloomberg , might know Google better than any other reporter in Silicon Valley, having broken numerous stories about its successes and scandals. As compelling as the very platform it investigates, Like, Comment, Subscribe is a thrilling, character-driven story of technological and creative ingenuity and the hubris that undermined it. Leseprobe Chapter 1 Everyday People Chad Hurley wanted to create something; he just wasn't sure what. It was early 2005, and Hurley spent most of his time hunched over a computer screen in Northern California. Hurley didn't look like the brainy Poindexters around Silicon Valley. He had broad shoulders and a high forehead, a high school jock physique, and dirty-blond locks that he swept back surfer-dude style. He liked beer and the Philadelphia Eagles and considered himself an artist of sorts. With a friend, a kindred spirit, he had recently started a menswear line making laptop bags after finding most on the market ugly and dull.  But Hurley, a web graphic designer, knew the real money was in computers, not bags, so that's where he and his two programmer pals, Jawed Karim and Steve Chen, hoped to strike gold. At twenty-eight, Hurley was the eldest, by a year, and de facto leader. He had a toddler son and had married into Silicon Valley royalty-his father-in-law was Jim Clark, a famed internet entrepreneur. Hurley began dreaming of his own company at the dawn of Web 2.0-websites filled with the work of regular folk, not professionals. Web surfers rushed to post online diaries, photo albums, poems, recipes, screeds, whatever they liked. "Everyday people," Hurley would call them. For months, Hurley and his pals had batted around proposals for a new internet business, meeting at his house in Menlo Park or a cafŽ nearby, where they discussed popular Web 2.0 fixtures to emulate, like Friendster, a social network, and the blogging websites growing like weeds. More often they talked about Hot or Not, a skeletal site that let people upload photographs of a face and vote on its attractiveness. Crude, but so popular. The trio knew one of Hot or Not's creators from a coffee shop they frequented at their old jobs, and they knew he was making decent money. That was cool. The three finally settled on an idea for a website to let people share and watch video. On Valentine's Day they had stayed up way too late, crammed in Hurley's garage with his dog, and settled on a name for their idea. Hurley tried words that evoked personal television, riffing on old slang for the medium, "the boob tube." A tube for you. They typed it into Google. No results. That evening, they bought the web domain YouTube.com, a first step on...

Report

Praise for Like, Comment, Subscribe

Named an Amazon Editors' Choice 

Bergen . . . catalogues YouTube s rise and the billions (of users, dollars, hours of video) it controls in a tone that is at once resigned, rhapsodic, and disgusted. The story his book unspools is one of breathtaking profit and foolish stumbles, violence and greed and corporate obfuscation.
The New Yorker

Anyone with an Internet connection knows just how much of a technological and cultural behemoth the site has become since then, and Bergen offers a revealing look at how YouTube has struggled with that growth. . . . The fast-paced story explores YouTube s challenges, including its handling of misinformation about the 2020 election and the coronavirus pandemic. It sharply explains how YouTube s economy has changed over time, and the backlash it s faced from creators and users over those changes.
Andrew DeMillo, AP

Mark Bergen has delivered the definitive look at how YouTube came to be and how the service has forever changed our society. Via meticulous reporting and enthralling story-telling, Like, Comment, Subscribe takes the reader on a journey as a small, whimsical idea morphs into something that alters our collective culture in the most profound of ways for better and for worse.
Ashlee Vance, author of Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future

Mark Bergen's Like, Comment, Subscribe is the intricately-reported, elegantly-crafted story of the website that came out of nowhere to change everything.
Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store and Amazon Unbound
 
An absorbing, alarming, and essential modern history of Silicon Valley s supersized platform age. YouTube has redefined celebrity, upended entertainment and politics, and unleashed the best and worst of humanity online. Mark Bergen s deeply reported page-turner takes us on the company s journey from scrappy startup to internet juggernaut, revealing the dark consequences of the pursuit of growth at any cost.
Margaret O'Mara, author of The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America

"A vivid, rollicking ride through the fluorescent-lit halls of one of the most powerful companies in the world as it struggles to steward one of the most anarchic yet culture-defining inventions of our time. Bergen has a novelist s eye, a poet s ear and a business journalist s deadpan command of the heart of the matter. So engrossing I missed my train stop."
Keach Hagey, author of The King of Content

"Intruiging. . . . Those curious about how YouTube got to be the behemoth it is should pick this up."
Publishers Weekly

Powerful insight into a ubiquitous yet still shadowy company.
Kirkus Reviews, "Most Anticipated Books of the Fall"

Product details

• Authors: Mark Bergen
• Publisher: Viking USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 06.09.2022
• EAN: 9780593653098
• ISBN: 978-0-593-65309-8
• No. of pages: 464
• Dimensions: 152 mm x 229 mm x 29 mm
• Subjects: Social sciences, law, business > Business > Individual industrial sectors, branches; TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING / Social Aspects, BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Industries / Entertainment, Information technology industries, Impact of science & technology on society, Impact of science and technology on society, Media, Information & Communication Industries