In 2005, just a few months after YouTube's launch, one of its cofounders announced that visitors consumed the equivalent of an entire Blockbuster worth of content every day. Now, 11 years later, YouTube is the third biggest website on the Internet. Blockbuster, a store that rented out VHS tapes, is a company I have to define in this article. See, VHS tapes were like cassette tapes with video. Cassette tapes were… Look, Blockbuster has been out of business for a long time and YouTube has a ton of content uploaded to it every second.
The common belief is that Netflix killed Blockbuster, and that is largely true. However, YouTube, specifically the creative people on YouTube, has had a greater impact on the way we consume content.
When it originally launched, people didn’t really know what to do with YouTube, including the cofounders. One of them posted the first ever YouTube video and it’s just him standing in front of some elephants explaining the concept of elephants.
But the early days of YouTube produced a couple of crossover stars and introduced a few ideas on which many content creators would expand. The stars I’m talking about are Bo Burnham and Donald Glover. Before starring in comedy specials and sitcoms, both Burnham and Glover posted amateur videos. Burnham’s were mainly funny songs he played in his room while Glover, as part of Derrick Comedy, posted sketches he made as a student at NYU.
But sketches and comedic songs were already popular at YouTube’s inception. The vlog, while already invented, found new levels of success on YouTube. From this sprung lonelygirl15, an early popular vlog on the site. After almost a year of weekly vlogs, it was revealed that lonelygirl15 was actually a completely fictionalized dramatic series, a reveal that could not have been pulled off in any other media.
The creativity generated as a result of mass video sharing did not stop there. Red vs Blue, a webseries created by Rooster Teeth, used the video game Halo with voice over to create its world. While RvB did not invent machinima, it did popularize it. Without Rooster Teeth, machinima would not be as large of a subgenre. Obviously, there are many other types of videos. How-to, prank, gaming, educational, but many of these have clear roots in older media.
When examining the evolution of YouTube content, it is important to remember how similar media progressed. NBC began to broadcast on a regular schedule in 1945, with the “Golden Age of Television” beginning in the early 2000s about 60 years later. Normally, dramatic evolution takes time.
The content put on YouTube has gone through a tremendous metamorphosis in the past eleven years alone. Casey Neistat has made vlogging an art by editing his content in an almost cinematic fashion. This contrasts with early or even current vlog channels, which feature people talking to a stationary camera or otherwise appear to be intentionally amaturely shot. Vlogging is already one of the most watched video genres on the site, having claimed the space that originally made reality television popular. YouTube is the best platform for interaction between audience and creator, which is exactly the kind of familiarity reality fans crave.
One genre that has sprouted in the time between YouTube’s creation and now is the video essay. Channels like Nerdwriter1, Wisecrack, and Idea Channel take modern pop culture and use it to examine philosophical questions in the video essay format. This is another genre that perhaps best exemplifies the uniqueness of the YouTube platform (along with vlogging).
As YouTubers' continue to evolve their content, more new ways of using the site will be explored and YouTubers themselves will gain more acceptance as members of the mainstream media, as opposed to being relegated to “internet sensations.” Pewdiepie, the most popular YouTuber, has over 45 million subscribers. "The Big Bang Theory" is the most popular show on television and it averages close to 20 million. The influence YouTube has over where content creation will go is immense, and it’s completely up to the audience.
