Nathan Withers
New Media
February 8, 2007

Site Analysis 1: YouTube

The internet video phenomenon, known as YouTube, has created a diverse and devoted culture of netizens. Moreover, unlike other media of the past the internet has created the ability to create and popularize sites like YouTube seemingly overnight. Roger Fidler’s theories on media development, and those of others he cites in, Mediamorphosis: Understanding New Media, had interesting congruencies to YouTube’s unpredicted conception.

Through an application of Brian Winston basic model of media development we come to understand that YouTube’s creation was no anomaly, but a blend of social, political, economic, and innovative forces. For YouTube the social seed had already been planted; western culture’s obsession with visual entertainment (music videos, television, and film), shortening attention spans, and new fascination with ‘reality’ shows were all the social elements needed for YouTube’s bloom. With no early political backlash, and with the prospect of cheap overhead and steep profit margins, three former employees of PayPal kindled an internet household name.

Those “supervening social necessities” as Winston called it enabled a technology that already existed to gain true cultural penetration. YouTube creators were not as much inventors as they were technological exploiters. Internet videos, popularized by Mark Cuban’s venture Broadcast.com, led to subsequent internet video players and to Macromedia Flash Player which is used by YouTube. Even once the software was made available for sites, such as youth oriented ebaumsworld.com or various sports sites, they only created internet traffic through niche audiences. There had yet to be an internet site that combined many networks of interest. YouTube was the product of mediamorphic transition within the internet video media. YouTube was able to combine film, television, sports, artistic, humor, political, music, reality, and blog videos into a single shared site. Moreover, YouTube capitalized on the niche interest and personalizing ability of previous sites by creating video groups and channels. This video melting pot is result of cultural and innovative pressures propelling the site into “an intrinsic self-organizing process,” or Fidler’s “complex, adaptive system.” YouTube took the chaos of the internet video craze and streamlined it; an evolution of media survival. The technological requirement was available, social winds were set, but YouTube had to still prove itself against the tried and true media formats of the past; television, film, and music media.

Just like the popularity of television reduced social interest in newspaper, magazines, and AM/FM radios it could be easily said that the world wide web, and specifically in this case YouTube, is producing a similar distracting affect on all other media including television. Despite a perceived dip in interest we can see Fidler’s mediamorphic process, in a multimedia context, taking place in the YouTube case. As Fidler mentioned in his piece, media norms have historically employed legal routes to maintain media supremacy. After a year of internet life YouTube began to gain traffic, and the attention of an agitated NBC and CBS. The two television corporations accused YouTube of copyright infringement because of the viewing of several of their television shows on the site. The disagreement gained YouTube even more publicity and both NBC and CBS not only relented but used the site to advertise for their television shows.[1] CBS’s president, Sean McManus, even went as far to state, “[o]ur inclination now is, the more exposure we get from clips like that, the better it is for CBS News and the CBS television network, so in retrospect we probably should have embraced the exposure, and embraced the attention it was bringing CBS, instead of being parochial and saying ‘let’s pull it down.”[2] Music corporations such as, Universal Music Group and Sony BMG Music Entertainment, drop complaints and give YouTube special copyright privileges as well.[3] The cooperation from the originally reluctant media competition is a perfect example of the mediamorphosis process called convergence; the idea that “all communication technologies are suffering a joint metamorphosis, which can only be understood properly if treated as a single subject.” The addition of YouTube and yet the continuation of older media is exemplary of coevolution of media.
It is possible that the only morphosis the YouTube creators saw was the reproduction of figures in their banks accounts when they sold YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion.[4] Averaging over 70,000 million visits a day,[5] regardless of its’ lucrative status, YouTube has undoubtedly displaced its’ social and technological presence on not only media scholars, but on the everyday lives of the most basic internet users.