Like comment subscribe, p.1
Like, Comment, Subscribe, page 1
VIKING
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Copyright © 2022 by Mark Bergen
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Bergen, Mark (Business journalist), author.
Title: Like, comment, subscribe : inside YouTube’s chaotic rise to world domination / Mark Bergen.
Description: New York : Viking, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022002106 (print) | LCCN 2022002107 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593296349 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593296356 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593653098 (international edition)
Subjects: LCSH: YouTube (Firm) | Google (Firm) | Internet videos—Social aspects. | Internet industry. | Internet entertainment industry.
Classification: LCC HD9696.8.U64 Y6834 2022 (print) | LCC HD9696.8.U64 (ebook) | DDC 338.7/6102504—dc23/eng/20220706
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022002106
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022002107
Cover design by Colin Webber
Designed by Cassandra Garruzzo Mueller
pid_prh_6.0_140845392_c0_r0
For Annie, my love
So much has been done, exclaimed the soul of Frankenstein—more, far more, will I achieve; treading in the steps already marked, I will pioneer a new way, explore unknown powers, and unfold to the world the deepest mysteries of creation.
MARY SHELLEY, FRANKENSTEIN, 1818
It was going to be a joke. This was all going to be a joke. Why did it become so real?
LOGAN PAUL, “WE FOUND A DEAD BODY IN THE JAPANESE SUICIDE FOREST,” YOUTUBE, 2017
Contents
Prologue: March 15, 2019
Part I
Chapter 1 Everyday People
Chapter 2 Raw and Random
Chapter 3 Two Kings
Chapter 4 Stormtroopers
Chapter 5 Clown Co.
Chapter 6 The Bard of Google
Chapter 7 Pedal to the Metal
Part II
Chapter 8 The Diamond Factory
Chapter 9 Nerdfighters
Chapter 10 Kitesurfing TV
Chapter 11 See It Now
Chapter 12 Will It Make the Boat Go Faster?
Chapter 13 Let’s Play
Chapter 14 Disney Baby Pop-Up Pals Easter Eggs SURPRISE
Chapter 15 The Five Families
Chapter 16 Lean Back
Chapter 17 The Mother of Google
Part III
Chapter 18 Down the Tubes
Chapter 19 True News
Chapter 20 Disbelief
Chapter 21 A Boy and His Toy
Chapter 22 Spotlight
Chapter 23 Joke, Threat, Obvious
Chapter 24 The Party Is Over
Chapter 25 Adpocalypse
Chapter 26 Reinforce
Chapter 27 Elsagate
Chapter 28 Bad Actors
Chapter 29 901 Cherry Avenue
Chapter 30 Boil the Ocean
Chapter 31 The Master’s Tools
Part IV
Chapter 32 Roomba
Chapter 33 Which YouTube?
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Sourcing Note
Notes
Index
PROLOGUE
March 15, 2019
Haji-Daoud Nabi, a grandfather with a thick white beard and a bright smile, met the man who would end his life on a sunny Friday afternoon in Christchurch, New Zealand. Nabi stood at the entrance to his mosque. As the younger man approached, Nabi assumed this visitor was coming to join in worship and greeted him warmly, “Hello, brother.”
Before his arrival the younger man had sent an email with the subject line “On the attack in New Zealand today.” The email began with a confession—“I was the partisan that committed the assault”—and included a long manifesto. It landed in in-boxes of the nation’s newspaper editors and television producers, professionals who, not too long ago, determined what was broadcast to the world. The email was dismissed as spam or the ramblings of a crank.
Then the calls flooded in. Gunshots heard everywhere around Christchurch’s Hagley Park. Lifeless, bloodied bodies lay across two mosques, sacred sites on either side of the park’s rich green. At least fifty dead, including a three-year-old child and Nabi. A reporter who landed on the scene, Kirsty Johnston, saw only carnage and wounded survivors frantically waving down taxis to the hospital. She had grown up in this placid island nation, where police usually didn’t carry guns, where violence and vitriol happened overseas, on the news. Not here.
But the nation had changed, and so had the news. Everyone soon learned that the terrorist behind the killings, a twenty-eight-year-old white man, had strapped on a body camera and broadcast seventeen minutes of his rampage live on the internet. And so those same newspaper editors and television producers combed through his footage and manifesto for any clues behind the country’s gravest mass shooting ever. They waded through arcane references to Serbian politics, sixteenth-century warfare, and internet subcultures. Little made sense. But one bit stood out as recognizable: the name of a YouTube star. “Remember, lads,” the terrorist said on-screen, moments before opening fire. “Subscribe to PewDiePie.”
* * *
• • •
In the days before, halfway around the globe, YouTube employees soaked in a gigantic, heated resort pool. They had arrived in shuttle buses, as always. The buses had come north, through San Francisco and Berkeley, through tony suburbs and towns, through forested state parks dotted with soaring redwoods, and into the heart of California wine country to Indian Springs, to a quaint hotel situated atop a natural hot spring in Calistoga. In 1859, that city was declared settled by California’s first millionaire, a man made rich by promoting the gold rush to anyone who would listen.
Claire Stapleton, a YouTube manager, unpacked her bags in a hotel cottage. She had done these corporate retreats many, many times before. This particular one was only for members of YouTube’s marketing division, those responsible for the upkeep of its public image, its brand. It would also be her last; she didn’t know it for certain then, but she had some suspicions.
Stapleton was pale with dark brown hair, nearly black. Normally carefree in demeanor, she could pull off stern, as she had in The New York Times four months earlier, where she was photographed in a solemn black turtleneck as the face of a rebellion inside Silicon Valley. At the resort, Stapleton walked out of her cottage and past an outdoor spill fountain, a lovely trellis garden, and a meditation circle to the small conference rooms named River and Reflection.
Overnight stays there for business groups cost around $350 a room. No issue for YouTube, which earned more than $11 billion in sales the prior year. Though these guests signed in under the name of another corporation: Google, YouTube’s owner and parent since 2006. Google posted sales of more than $136 billion in 2018. Yet the technology Goliath was trying to be more cautious with its wealth. A financial chief had come from Wall Street and pinched pennies at a company famed for spending freely. Also, two years into Trump’s America, Google and its Silicon Valley peers, used to being celebrated as innovators and underdogs, suddenly found themselves reviled as greedy, irresponsible, and too powerful. As the establishment. Even some of Google’s own employees had started seeing the company this way.
To limit such unwanted attention, Google now held fewer retreats at lavish, exclusive spots. Indian Springs was perfectly understated. From the outside the two-story, Spanish-mission-style property looked like a simple 1950s motel, but there were subtle touches of luxury inside: organic shampoos, “Be Well” filtered-water stations, and faux fireplaces. The resort had managed, by some miracle, to pipe hot springs water into a gentle, calming Olympic-sized pool.
Stapleton and her colleagues were encouraged to enjoy themselves. It had been a stressful year or two. Google had, everyone knew, some of the happiest employees on earth. Yet its regular survey of staff satisfaction, called Googlegeist, had recently returned troubling results: more employees were reporting shrinking faith in the company’s leadership and priorities, and nearly half felt their pay was not “fair and equitable.” That fall, Stapleton had led thousands of employees in a protest against Google’s handling of sexual harassment charges. Google had a long-established alarm system for its vast computer network. “Code Yellow” meant software programmers should work overtime to fix a flaw or bug. “Code Orange” was close to an emergency. “Code Red” rang when Google’s search page or its email service stopped working. Fix it now. The company had extended this alarm system to nontechnical affairs, such as the satisfaction levels of staff.
This YouTube retreat at Indian Springs was unofficially designated a “Well-Being Code Red.”
Stapleton’s marketing team went to wine-tasting sessions in town and took pizza-making classe
Once Stapleton arrived in the River and Reflection rooms, she sat for a mandatory screening of a YouTube video they had all seen before. Someone pulled it up online and pressed the iconic triangular Play button.
YouTube: “Our Brand Mission.” June 22, 2017. 1:48.
The video begins with a small boy in his bedroom, too cute with his too-big electric guitar. It cuts to another child, somewhere in Asia, herding sheep; then a woman crying; a man landing a skate trick. “Look at these moments,” a female voice-over begins. “All of these stories. Secrets. Revelations. From every corner of the world.” It is a montage of inspiring YouTube footage. Babies, athletes, random acts of kindness, a woman in a hijab, group dancers, group huggers, more criers. “This is the rarest, purest, most unfiltered portrait of who we are as a people,” the narrator says. “This is what happens when you give everyone a voice, a chance to be heard, a stage to be seen.”
The video closed with familiar text, YouTube’s brand mission: “Give everyone a voice and show them the world.” So strange, Stapleton thought. So much of the world had changed since her team first made this motivational montage back in 2017. So much of YouTube had changed. She had been in countless conversations about reworking its brand mission since then, and they were still playing the same old video as motivation. She kept these thoughts to herself.
Fourteen years after its founding, YouTube.com was still a marvel of the modern world. In under two decades, on-demand lightning-fast internet television had gone from an impossibility to a simple fact of life. YouTube had become the place for free moving pictures online. “The video scaffolding of the internet,” one employee called it. More than 2 billion people visited every month, making YouTube the second most frequented website on earth (behind Google). It was also the world’s second most popular search engine (behind Google). By mid-2019, some 1.7 billion people—more than a third of the world’s internet population—visited YouTube every day. They used YouTube for entertainment, instruction, and comfort. Polls showed that a quarter of Americans relied on YouTube for news, and more people visited the site regularly than Facebook, Instagram, or any other social media. An entire generation of children had ditched television for YouTube. In many countries, YouTube was television. YouTube reinvented supermarket tabloids and instruction manuals. In parts of Silicon Valley, futurists imagined YouTube replacing college professors and doctors.
And unlike virtually any other website open to the masses, YouTube paid its contributors. That novelty had birthed an entire creative industry, a stable of performers, personalities, artists, influencers, instructors, and franchises, a new media as revolutionary as radio and TV, all in just a few short years. YouTube made everyone broadcasters. YouTube has given us “Gangnam Style,” Charlie biting a finger, “Baby Shark,” It’s Friday, Friday, gotta get down on Friday. Yoga with Adriene, lunch doodles with Mo, professional Minecraft players. A diverse sea of enormous talent old media had ignored or overlooked. Thousands of microcelebrities you might not know, but millions of young fans certainly do, watching with a fervor they never show for movie or TV stars.
YouTube was formed in the same stretch as a crop of flashy consumer internet upstarts, and has outlasted nearly all of them, except Facebook. But while Facebook has since struggled to remain relevant to young people, YouTube never has—it draws in younger and younger audiences, year after year. No company has done more to create the online attention economy we’re all living in today. YouTube started paying people to make videos when Facebook was still a site for dorm-room flirting, when Twitter was a techie fad, and a decade before TikTok existed. All those companies ripped from Google their philosophy—more information online is better—and their business model: get a free service to as many people as possible and mine their clicks, habits, and data to sell ads. Influencers, preteen millionaires, fake news, internet addictions, con artists—Google and YouTube enabled all these messy wonders and ills of social media, usually first. “Google made the wheel,” one veteran of Google and Facebook said. “Facebook and every other internet company copied it.”
YouTube was as reliable as running water and as voluminous as an ocean. Before the Indian Springs retreat, the company publicized this unfathomable stat: 450 hours of video were uploaded every minute to its site. Imagine the longest movie you’ve ever seen. A Lord of the Rings, maybe. Now imagine watching it one hundred times in a row, and you still have not sat through the footage added to YouTube every sixty seconds. Since 2016 people have watched more than a billion hours of video there every single day. The mind numbs. Want a video on any topic imaginable? It’s probably there. Type, type, click. Like, comment, subscribe. Billions did that every day, with little knowledge of how the video that popped up before them wound up there.
Everyone knew YouTube. But few knew how it works—who runs it, what decisions they make, and why those decisions matter. This book was written to remedy that. It is the story of a business that transformed from a money pit into a raging commercial success, a pillar of the internet that made Google one of the world’s most profitable and powerful companies. It’s the story of a new mass media programmed not by editors, artists, or educators but by algorithms. And it’s the story of some very consequential, and very strange, recent events that most people who visit YouTube.com know nothing about.
For most people used YouTube as a utility, a well of information, or a harmless pastime.
But YouTube contained far more than that. YouTube’s marketing team was all too aware of a different, more disturbing side. And as they sat in the resort, in River and Reflection, watching their own marketing footage, touching and warm, they couldn’t help but notice how distant it felt from the Nightmare Fuel.
Nightmare Fuel was a grim moniker some on the team used to refer to a daily email that monitored press coverage and online chatter about YouTube, normal fare. But the emails also exposed the site’s underbelly, its bizarre corners and horrors. The term “Nightmare Fuel” was born after a YouTube star broadcast a dead body hanging in a Japanese forest. Because the marketing team handled all of YouTube’s official online accounts, they needed to be made aware of the site’s constantly shifting controversies lest they accidentally wade into one. Like when teens started posting videos documenting their consumption of laundry detergent pods, marketing had a new edict—don’t post anything about laundry. When a thirteen-year-old girl generated press for making ASMR videos on YouTube with troubling sexual connotations—best to avoid ASMR, and maybe teenage girls. Or when a news story noted the preponderance of horse bestiality on YouTube—nothing horse related. This deluge of videos and critical coverage piled into their in-boxes every morning. Stapleton worried that Nightmare Fuel made her team think YouTube reflected the worst of humanity.
Most of the retreat offered a nice escape from the Nightmare Fuel. Except one agenda item: the team was told they were to end a long moratorium and begin using YouTube’s corporate accounts to promote PewDiePie. This order, marketing staff there understood, had come from on high, “from Susan.” This was Susan Wojcicki (pronounced wo-JIT-ski), Google’s first marketer and YouTube’s chief executive since 2014.
Each person at the retreat knew the tale of PewDiePie.
Real name: Felix Kjellberg (pronounced SHEL-burg), a Swede, not yet thirty, fond of shrieking his online persona as a customary greeting in his videos. PEW dee PIIIIIIIIIE! He was YouTube’s biggest star by a metric the company invented: “subscribers.” Viewers clicked on a tiny red button to subscribe to video makers (as they would for a magazine or cable package, only this was free). When YouTube introduced this feature, its inventors never imagined that any given broadcaster would get more than a few million subscribers, tops. By March 2019, PewDiePie had nearly 100 million, on par with the Instagram followings of celebrities like Miley Cyrus and Katy Perry. Kjellberg had debuted as PewDiePie nine years earlier, eons in YouTube years, streaming himself playing video games and publishing his reels, like everyone else, at his own discretion, straight into the great big video tapestry. Over time, he had amassed a ferociously loyal fan base.
