When most people think of YouTube, they think of viral videos of cute animals doing equally cute things or some hilarious example of human stupidity documented forever on a blurry iPhone video. However, YouTube is becoming more and more prominent as something very few people associate it with: a business platform.
In recent years, YouTube pumped out some staggering statistics. It has more than a billion unique viewers every month, outranking Facebook. Users upload 100 hours of footage every minute. And it's the No. 2 search engine on the Internet, second only to Google itself. While many social media sites tend to get stale after a year or two, YouTube seems to gain value with age.
It’s clear that YouTube has some serious muscles to flex, so why is the website still primarily associated with funny videos of finger-biting babies?
Perhaps because the sheer creativity and level of eccentricity present in the website is what allowed it to become what it is and what continues to keep it thriving.
The platform originated as simply as this: a bunch of random videos that random people posted for no particular reason. However, over the years, it developed into a multi-million dollar industry, allowing for elaborate business models and even celebrity to come into play with content creators like PewDiePie, a gaming channel, earning nearly $5.5 million annually.
Through its progress, YouTube became a diverse, innovative ground on which multiple different — and very successful — ideas have been built.
Take the Vlogbrothers, Hank and John Green, for instance. The Greens launched their channel in 2007, each creating video blogs as means of communication between the two. Seven years later the brothers together launched a total of 27 channels with more than 8.3 million subscribers and 956 million views.
Due to its fan interaction along with the brother’s inventive natures, they became the heart of the YouTube community. Hank Green created an Emmy-winning channel creating fictional vlog series following the plot of "Pride and Prejudice" and other classic works and formed an annual YouTube convention, VidCon, to bring the community together. John Green, author of "The Fault in our Stars" and "Looking For Alaska," recently partnered with Bill Gates to provide water in Ethiopia, raising a total of about $440,000.
That doesn’t sound like something to be condescended to. In fact, their ventures on the website were more successful that most modern-day businesses in general. The craziest thing about the Vlogbrother’s success stories is that it is one out of hundreds to be found on the site.
YouTube, in a way, epitomizes the almost completely distinct idea of the “American Dream.” Its platform is nondiscriminatory. It allows for individuals to go head to head with corporations and major artists and succeed. The most successful channel, PewDiePie, is one of a Swedish guy playing video games. A YouTube-based news broadcasting channel, The Young Turks, is outranking giant news sources like ABC and CNN.
YouTube is a big fan of the “little guys,” and that’s working for it. Ventures people cannot make in a normal business climate, they make on YouTube, which provides them with a potential audience and a creative network.
Due to its vast opportunity for interactivity and creativity along with its relatively low cost of failure, the website as a whole, simply put, is a business phenomenon, one that will play a crucial part in an increasingly digital future — one that still hasn’t fully been recognized as a legitimate field despite that fact that hundreds of creators on the site make a living off of “making videos.”
With stars like Troye Sivan and Bethany Mota, two YouTubers recently placed on TIME’s 25 Most Influential Teens of 2014 list along with icons like Lorde and Malala Yousafzai, and many others slowly rising into the major role of “celebrity,” it seems imminent that the platform be taken more seriously. Granted, they’re no Jennifer Lawrence or Ben Affleck, but their increasing popularity is vast.
It’s time that professionals stop condescending toward YouTubers and the platform itself, like they have many times before, and start considering it what it really is: the future of social media and marketing.
With television, radio and print news slowly dying out, the Internet will soon take the main stage, and while the website is still home to plenty of viral videos, it has grown with its audience becoming a tool just waiting to be used.
Reach the columnist at mjanetsk@asu.edu or follow her on Twitter @meganjanetsky
Editor’s note: The opinions presented in this column are the author’s and do not imply any endorsement from The State Press or its editors.
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