How YouTube transformed our world

This rebroadcast originally aired May 30, 2025.

YouTube turns 20 this year. The platform now hosts 20 billion videos, and lets basically anyone, anywhere on Earth, create, share and watch. How has YouTube changed us?

Mark Bergen, reporter at Bloomberg. Author of “Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination."

Cam James, filmmaker, primarily on YouTube. His YouTube channel, called Cam James, has 116,000 subscribers.

Kurt Wilms, senior director of product management at YouTube.

The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:

Part I

MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Hey guys. Welcome back to my channel. (LAUGHS) Okay. I was told by my producers I needed to do that, and so I just did.

But in truth, I'm Meghna Chakrabarti, and this is On Point.

(MONTAGE)

MICHAILA COTHRAN:  Hey y'all, it's Michaila. Welcome back to my YouTube channel.

FORREST KRITZER: What's up guys? Welcome back to the channel.

STEPHANY VICTORIA: Hey guys.

WILL ON A WHIM: Hi guys!

DR. MICHAEL ROWE: Hey everyone.

MADFIT: Hello everybody.

STEVE WALLIS: Hey guys.

SYDNEY SERENA: Welcome back.

MADFIT: Welcome back.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh yeah, YouTube, it turns 20 this year, and the platform now hosts more than 20 billion with a B videos. It lets basically anyone anywhere in the world create, share, and watch, and YouTube has changed how people learn about and engage with the world.

(MONTAGE)

TOM HAUSER:  I love YouTube for learning how to do any do it yourself, DIY, task.

JENSEN DIY: Hi everyone, welcome. Well, I take it you’re having problems with your toilet. I mean, unless you’re just a die-hard plumbing enthusiast.

WILLIAM GEORGE: Whether it's learning how to pickle, how to replace the air cabin filter in your car.

BNX TRUFILTER: You’re gonna have to remove your — I’m not sure what this is called – it’s like back-plating of your glove compartment. Okay?

MATTHEW MCNEW: It’s saved me probably thousands of dollars in repair bills.

JASON TUCKER: I've discovered that I'm capable of really quite a lot. And then sometimes I discover, nope, that one needs to be a professional.

HOWARD TURNER: Watch the PWHL season on YouTube. Bowling videos to try to help my grandson.

FORREST KRITZER: If you’re new to bowling, naturally, to hook the bowling ball, you think you have to spin over the top of the ball to get the ball to rotate.

JOHN BRENNAN: I am very much a Motown fan. I'm 70 years old, so it provides a nostalgia for me to watch these clips.

DUSTY SPRINGFIELD: (SINGING) I’m wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin.’

REBECCA HALE: I love it. I'm a 76-year-old widow. I have friends and I do things. But YouTube just gives me anything I want. I feel like, oh, this subject, I can find it.

LANCE GAUER: You can use it to learn anything. Especially, like, Spanish. Khan Academy was big. Definitely in college, used a lot of YouTube.

LINGO MASTERY SPANISH: Hola. Chao. Gracias.

AMY MADISON: We'll watch long form documentaries, travel shows. We have our favorite creators. And when I get in bed, I put on an ASMR video so that I can fall asleep.

It's just a huge part of my life and I don't really know what I would do and what I would watch and how I would fall asleep if it weren't for YouTube.

CHAKRABARTI: Those were On Point listeners Tom in Winston-Salem, North Carolina; William in Asheville, North Carolina; Matthew in Enid, Oklahoma; Jason in Clearwater, Florida; Howard in Elkhart, Indiana; John in Upton, Massachusetts; Rebecca in western Oregon; Lance in Eagan, Minnesota; and Amy in Louisville, Kentucky.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So how do we measure YouTube’s reach and impact? Here’s one way.

KURT WILMS: We do a billion hours of content watched every single day, which is pretty incredible.

Kurt Wilms is senior director of product management at YouTube.

 It's the No. 1 platform on television streaming in the U.S. Maybe you’ve heard or seen some of the early viral videos such as Charlie Bit My Finger is a pretty famous one — or David After the Dentist. Those early days are kind of gone and now we have creators who are producing what I would call, like must-see TV of this generation.

CHAKRABARTI: The Met Gala was live-streamed on YouTube this year. So was the music festival Coachella. There’s also the on-demand streaming service YouTube TV, which is competing with companies like Netflix and Hulu.

And before though, this sounds like a giant ad for YouTube. It is most certainly not because of course YouTube does not, doesn't have just exclusively wholesome creator content.

It is a major source of disinformation around the world. The algorithm readily serves up lies truth or content conspiracy theories. A la Alex Jones's Infowars. I just did a quick YouTube search this morning for Flat Earth and I got tossed up videos that have been viewed 1 million, 3 million, even 5 million times.

That's a part of YouTube's story as well. But the big question is, with all of this content and two decades of YouTube, how has it actually changed how we all see the world and maybe even has it changed us? So Mark Bergen joins us today to talk about it. He's reporter at Bloomberg and author of “Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination."

Mark, welcome back to On Point.

MARK BERGEN: Hi. Thanks for having me again.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. Other than work, how often do you think you use YouTube?

BERGEN: Oh God. Starting with the hardest question. I will say that I became a bit of an addict in part because I removed Twitter from my phone a few years ago. And it's either LinkedIn or YouTube is my go-to.

And I also try not to use Instagram, so I won't quantify it. Because I'll be embarrassed.

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS)

BERGEN: But it's a substantial amount and certainly not, I can't say it's all for work.

CHAKRABARTI: And we could say just every day. How's that? We don't have to say for the number of hours.

BERGEN: Alright. Yeah. I'm a daily active user.

CHAKRABARTI: I have a similar story. I went from hating YouTube. Because I was like, oh my god. How many cat videos can there be? To, actually, I am a daily user of it for the same reasons that all those On Point listeners told us they use YouTube. Is I just find it to be a university of really top-quality knowledge of anything that I want to learn about.

But how would we measure really how big YouTube is or how pervasive is, what are some of the metrics we might turn to?

BERGEN: God, yeah, I mean I think you played that clip from Kurt who's an employee there and I believe he said 1 billion hours of YouTube. I think that's just on TV screens.

So that's not even, that's not, I use it mostly in my phone. Most people still watch it on desktop computers. I think YouTube stopped sharing some numbers. Because they were just so astronomically large. The superlatives are pretty easy, by most measures, it's certainly the world's biggest video streaming service.

It's the biggest podcasting service, most likely, it's probably the world's biggest music service. It's almost certainly the world's biggest kids' entertainment service. And I could, and as you pointed out, it's definitely the world's biggest service for learning how to fix your car or your sink.

It probably is the biggest library of historical video and potentially educational video imaginable. And I think that gives us some sense of the scale.

CHAKRABARTI: In terms of its entertainment power, I have heard that it's going to rival or give Disney a run for its money.

BERGEN: That's right. There were some analysts that said next year, just based on the amount of revenue and sales the company has. So it makes about, last year, it made say 36 billion in advertising and maybe another 15 to 20 in subscriptions. They don't, the company doesn't release that number. There are some audience metrics from Nielsen that just came out last month that their share, YouTube share of TV are larger now than all of Disney's networks and their streaming services, which I found to be, I was shocked by that number.

So it has been, for 20 years now, really trying to be on par with tv and I think the company's achieved that.

CHAKRABARTI: So $36 billion in revenue. We're gonna talk a little bit later about how much that revenue is going to the millions of people that are actually creating the content that YouTube is profiting from. But let's do some archeology, some digital archeology. Mark if we could, because I wanna play what is the first ever YouTube video, which was posted on April 23rd, 2005. It's 19 seconds long, and it's called, I guess they weren't looking for SEO friendly titles.

It's called Me at the Zoo and it's grainy footage from one of YouTube's co-founders, Jawed Karim, and he's standing in front of San Diego Zoo's Elephant enclosure.

(VIDEO PLAYS)

Alright, so here we are. One of the elephants and cool thing about these guys is that they have really long trunks and that's cool.

And that's pretty much all there's to say.

CHAKRABARTI: I'm sorry it makes me laugh. He's standing in front of elephants, and his one comment is, they have long trunks. But who is, I'd said that Jawed was YouTube's co-founders. Can you tell us the sort of genesis story of YouTube?

BERGEN: Sure. Jawed had met Steve Chen, who's another fellow engineer at PayPal, and then the designer called Chad Hurley.

And the three of them were working at PayPal, which was one of these early Silicon Valley success stories. It was at the time, pretty innovative online payments. And there was, it had a success. It sold to eBay. It was the first generation of these internet entrepreneurs that said oh, I was successful at one company.

Now the real, the climbing the mountain is building my own. And they were batting around ideas for a company. I think video was one of several. This was a time when flip cameras and online sort of capturing video footage was just started beginning. Social networks, Facebook was formed just months before, was early 2005.

MySpace was, if you can recall, was probably the most popular site in the world at the time. And so this was the beginning of what we call like user generated content, social media, right? People not just looking at the web, but like a newspaper on their computer, but contributing to it. And that was the first live video.

But in fact, the founders had posted, who knows, countless numbers of videos before they went live. Just trying, Steve Chen, who was one of the co-founders, told me the hours he spent trying to make sure that the video, his lips synced up with the sound.

Which is, at the time it was a difficult feat and computationally difficult.

And now we certainly take advantage of, when was the last time you had to wait buffering for a YouTube video. But back 20 years ago, that was still something that required a lot of engineering manpower.

CHAKRABARTI: Isn't that amazing? Because now we're just like, we just presume that everything's gonna be in 4K as soon as we hit play.

BERGEN: 100%.

CHAKRABARTI: But what was interesting to me is that even quite quickly there were major like entertainment creators who looked at YouTube and said, Hey here's potentially another way for us to get more eyeballs. Because we've got a clip here from Saturday Night Live. It could be the first video to have gone viral on YouTube.

It's a parody rap video by Andy Sandberg and Chris Parnell and fans, I should say, uploaded it to YouTube in December of 2005.

(VIDEO PLAYS)

ANDY SAMBERG AND CHRIS PARNELL (Rapping): Lazy Sunday, wake up in the late afternoon / Call Parnell just to see how he's doin / (Hello?) / What up, Parns?/ Yo Samberg, what's crackin' / You thinkin' what I'm thinkin' / Narnia! / Man it's happenin' / But first my hunger pangs are stickin' like duct tape / Let's hit up Magnolia and mack on some cupcakes.

CHAKRABARTI: So Mark that's a fan uploaded video, to correct my earlier mistake, but did early entertainment creators actually see YouTube as potentially the kind of competition that it's turned into now?

BERGEN: Yes and no. I think that was a really telling example where that crew of kind of young internet savvy SNL performers certainly did. Their bosses at NBC did not.

And that became one of these, that was around the time early in YouTube's history, there were a lot of these videos that had to questionably copyright, whether or not YouTube had the rights. And that became a major issue later on.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Let's just listen to another On Point listener. This is Lance in Eagan, Minnesota, and he actually has really fond memories of the early days of YouTube when he says he was in middle school in what he calls the most creative years of his life.

LANCE: My friends and I, we loved to just roam our neighborhood, bring cameras with us.

We ended up having a ding-dong ditch that we filmed, got onto YouTube and just happened to make, it was like the number one ding-dong ditch in views on YouTube for many years. I don't know. That was cool.

CHAKRABARTI: Mark, do you know what a ding-dong ditch is?

BERGEN: I confess that I do not, but I'm definitely gonna look that up later.

CHAKRABARTI: I'm literally looking it up right now because I can't believe I don't know what that is. I hope it's something that I can talk about on the radio. Oh, you ring somebody's doorbell and run away before they open the door. Sounds very middle school. I like it.

BERGEN: That would be my guess. Yeah.

CHAKRABARTI: So what made YouTube, first of all, when did YouTube catch Google's attention?

Because it's been under Google ownership for some time. And why was it of interest to Google?

BERGEN: Yeah, it was actually remarkably early. It was bought within 18 months of its life. And I think YouTube, they shared some investors, early investors in Google. Sequoia Capital was also an investor in YouTube.

And Silicon Valley's a small place. I think there were two main reasons. Google actually had a competing product. Probably very few people remember, called Google Video. That was their attempt to capture what, they, like a lot of companies, Microsoft, Yahoo, all these sort of giants at the time knew that the TV, like TV was moving online.

The video was moving online, and they wanted to have some foot in that race. And the second thing is that Google noticed that YouTube was becoming a major place where people were searching for things. They were going, they were either searching on Google for YouTube videos or they were going directly to YouTube to search for funny videos, for useful videos.

And so I think Google has and still is at the time and still is today. It was a search company primarily. And so they looked at YouTube as this potential competition for search and better to have it inside the house than out.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, that's interesting. Okay. And I can't remember how much Google bought YouTube for.

BERGEN: 1.65 billion which at the time was a huge sum and for a company that there's some claim that they were gonna close to a profit, but they were definitely losing money.

CHAKRABARTI: But, and so how did Google turn that around? What did they add to the mix that really rocketed YouTube to become this like almost daily essential for people?

BERGEN: Yeah. For one, Google is never at risk of running out of money. Google has this phenomenally profitable search advertising business and that sort of subsidized YouTube for a very long time.

And their sort of edict was YouTube just keep growing, keep doing your thing, keep expanding. Google allowed YouTube to expand every country in the world outside of China, and they, as I had in my book, they tried China a little bit. And the second thing is that Google runs the world's biggest digital advertising company.

And so that was enabled to kinda, YouTube just fit right into that and it became this sort of natural place for, to run a pretty successful ads business.

CHAKRABARTI: I got it. Okay. And one more thing, what you're describing is actually the ideal founding, seemingly on the surface, founding and growth of a majorly successful tech company.

But you talk about it being like that the YouTube's rivals was also chaotic and just stealing from the sub, the subhead of your book. What was chaotic about it?

BERGEN: Sure. I know one. Many things was the right soon after the Google bought them, they, YouTube was sued by Viacom the parent at the time of MTV, Nickelodeon Comedy Central, for a billion dollars.

So they were, and that was one of several lawsuits around copyright. There was, something I'm super, incredibly fascinating, was YouTube went to places like Turkey in India and Pakistan countries where free speech and free video is much more difficult than in the U.S., right?

And YouTube went in there with very few people on the ground, sometimes no people on the ground. And so in the Arab Spring that's a really fascinating moment, but they had just countless number of stories and some are public and some probably will never see the light of day.

Dealing with these really gray areas about what's acceptable speech, what's acceptable video, how much is the company responsible, how much is the creator responsible? And that's something, and YouTube from its early days really struggled to draw lines there.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. We're gonna come back to that a little bit because of course we are unconsciously being U.S. centric here, but it is a global --

BERGEN: Sure, sure.

CHAKRABARTI: Information phenomenon. But back to the way that YouTube has turned niche into something that can be accessed by anyone in the world. We have a clip from a creator named Travis Warrington. He's actually an On Point listener in Lake Stevens, Washington, and his YouTube channel is called Travis Does Firewood.

 And welcome back, firewood addicts to another episode of Travis Does Firewood. And today I'm giving you a firewood update.

My niche genre of being outdoors and firewood — making firewood, selling, chainsaw splitting, et cetera, is very, very niche. But there are a lot of channels within that. I can do, do reviews. I've been sponsored on my channel. I'm big, but I'm not that big.

So I'm gonna give you a tour of my woodyard to show you what I have ready to go to sell, ready to go to, to burn come fall. So in this area here, I had what's called my bonfire wood.

I'm an adult stutterer and I've stuttered since I was five. And I thought that that was gonna be an issue in my channel, and I'm sure it is in terms of like, my growth, but hitting 500 subs count, hitting a thousand, hitting now 2000 subs, I thought people would just turn me off because they would hear me speak and stutter. But people don't notice it. And I feel that that — the channel has increased my self-confidence.

CHAKRABARTI: So that's Travis Warrington and his channel is Travis does Firewood.

Let me bring Cam James into the program now. Cam is a filmmaker primarily on YouTube and his YouTube channel called Cam James has 116,000 subscribers and he joins us from WABE in Atlanta, Georgia. Cam, welcome to On Point.

CAM JAMES: Hello Meghna. How's it going?

CHAKRABARTI: It's going great. Tell me a little bit about you had a viral, a video go viral a couple of years ago.

What was that video and what did that do to your life?

JAMES: It was the first ever episode of my series, deep dive$, and it was called The Rise of FUBU Scammers: Black-Owned Multi-Level Marketing Companies. It's a mouthful of a title, but it was about what it says it's about. Essentially companies that are operating in my opinion as pyramid schemes with a product attached.

And that's a lot of what I talk about on the channel is financial schemes and scams and just educating my community. And what it did to my life was drastic. I give YouTube a lot of credit for being the thing that kind of allowed me to take my creative talents and make a full-time career out of it.

Six months after releasing that video, I quit my full-time job at an ad agency and jumped in.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow. Okay. We have a clip from that video and in the video, it's about 20 minutes long, the whole thing. And as you said, you go through one by one through some of these businesses that you said were targeting the Black community.

So here's a clip from that.

They misspelled representative at the top of the page. They offer web development when they can barely put together a website themselves. There's over nine dedicated staff. So how many is it? 10? 27? (BLEEP) is you talking about! They falsely claim that their two biggest packages are sold out to manufacturer popularity, and they got a bunch of fake Google reviews that can't be crosschecked. You can't click on these (BLEEP).

CHAKRABARTI: So Cam, what gave you the idea for the kinds of videos that you make, the deep dives.

JAMES: I've always been, like, I'm old internet, so I'm millennial.

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS) That makes me geriatric internet.

JAMES: (LAUGHS) Didn't intend any offense to anybody who's older, gen Z is on the rise now, right?

So I'm feeling a little bit old, because they call me old, anyway. I'm a millennial and so I remember the founding of YouTube. I was 15 and I remember just all the things that it's been through over time, and I've always been an internet arguer, like I've been debating people in comment sections forever.

So I was like, you know what, this is raising my blood pressure. It is making me angry on a daily basis. So why not take these things I'm passionate about? And solve one of the problems I identify with the internet, which is that nobody cites their sources ever. And there it is just a bunch of disinformation everywhere.

And I monitored the landscape of YouTube, decided to do everything differently, as much as I could, and I brought that energy to this series. And I keep talking about things that I'm either interested in. Or I really want to correct the record on.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, okay. I'm gonna have to hit subscribe on your channel 'cause I haven't watched very many of them yet, but I'll put it on my list. Mark.

So we're gonna hear more from Cam about the business of being a creator, because it's an all-consuming job. But is it significant at all that from the beginning, and maybe this didn't really even change under Google's ownership, that YouTube was just like anybody who can post pretty much anything, that must have been a deliberate decision.

BERGEN: Yeah. They always had lines. Sex and pornography is a no go from the early days. They designed a site for reasons, regulatory, like policy reasons, they had to make it for 13 and above. They're certainly, like the caller that was said, he was in middle school.

I wonder if he was actually under 13. But technically you're meant to be over 13 when you use the site.

CHAKRABARTI: When you use, you mean just even to watch videos?

BERGEN: Yeah, they have YouTube kids but that was, they've always had that like little fine print, right?

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah.

Literally nobody follows this 13 and above rule.

BERGEN: Right. But the, I think that it was intentionally, it was very much like we're not television. We are, that was certainly the, from both YouTube and Google. This is, they felt that was a conviction, that they had this philosophy of almost anything goes within reason, and they clearly have to change that quite a bit in the past two decades.

CHAKRABARTI: Cam this does your channel support support you financially for all your financial needs, your life?

JAMES: Yes. It got to that point around the time that I quit my job. I had to do the math and make sure that my basic expenses and wants and needs and all that stuff, and chart the course for the next rest of the year.

And that's how I made the decision to leave my job. And that's a mix of YouTube's revenue along with sponsorships. And most creators need a lot of sponsorships, quite frankly, to make sure that ship stays afloat.

CHAKRABARTI: Is the greater portion of your income from those sponsorships or from the YouTube revenue?

JAMES: Oh, 100% YouTube. I'm trying to be delicate with how I put this. Because like I said, at the top, I'm grateful for YouTube, but they do not pay a lot. And that's just the nature of programmatic advertising, which I can explain in more detail. But the nature of that advertising is that companies are gonna pay as little as they can.

To maximize their budgets. And so we need to supplement that with the sponsorships we take on.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So Mark, just quickly. Because you mentioned earlier that YouTube's revenue was something like $36 billion last year. Do we know how much of that is actually going to content creators?

BERGEN: It's a really good question.

They don't break on that line item. I think part of the issue here is that Cam is also sharing advertising revenue with Jimmy Kimmel, right? And Kendrick Lamar, and the record labels there and there have I think been a lot of really smart YouTubers that have made this point more elegantly than me, but it's like tilted in favor of the big media companies and record labels.

They have different contracts with YouTube than like independent creators do. They have a lot more perks. YouTube wants those big stars, and they want TV networks to be posting. And it's pretty top heavy in some ways that said, and I'm not defending YouTube here, but I think Instagram has tried, Facebook has tried many different times. TikTok, Twitter, no company has really come close to building out this creator economy anywhere close to what YouTube's done. But there's just so many millions of people competing for a smaller and smaller slice of the pie.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, interesting. Okay. So Cam, tell me a little bit more about you have, like, how you go about deciding what kind of videos you wanna make. How much of time does it take? What's the effort that you have to put into it? How much do you think about, is this video gonna get a lift from the algorithm or not?

I'd love for you to take us inside that thinking.

JAMES: So I'll start with how do I decide what type of videos I make. It's one thing to establish a niche and it's another thing to establish a series within that niche and market yourself. These are all separate talents. These are separate skills, those of which I developed before I jumped into this, and luckily, I had a head start.

I was doing professional video work for clients, and I was a musician before that. And so I have all these skills, and I put them together, and I just decided that I would market this essentially as a TV series on YouTube that helped me get my start, and it helped me define. Okay, episode to episode, where do we jump to from multi-level marketing?

I jumped to payroll payday loans, and then I jumped to the state lottery system, and I jumped to the music industry. And so I jumped from scam to scam and financial education topic to topic, and that helped me define my course. And over time, that expanded into subseries and different ways to make that content that's less time consuming, and that takes me directly to how much time it takes.

An episode of deep dive$ roughly takes about a full seven days, and I'm talking full time, clocking in, working for eight to 10 hours each day, minimum.

To get one of those done, that's research, that's scripting. Because I write these full scripts and they're seven, eight pages long on a Word doc and not in large font either.

And so that's a full script. And then I'm shooting outside. A lot of YouTubers don't do that. Like I said, I looked at the landscape and decided to do things differently. So I'm outside with a microphone in my hand, like a reporter, and it's just my own personal spin on it. So I'm dragging equipment outside.

I'm setting up, I gotta deal with the sun. So I'm filming that, and then I take it back to the edit bay, which is my apartment, and I'm doing that for three days straight to get it tight enough to where it's like a punchy 30 minutes roughly episode of my series. So that's deep dive$. And then I made smaller series later, that take less time.

I can crank that out in three days, like episodes, like a series like cra$h outs, for example. And the more recent one I made called refrigerator after watching or raw. So I make new things all the time that allow me to dial it in.

Yeah. But essentially, you're talking about the effort it takes to make what is the same, it's the same thing as high production value television. And it's coming to--

JAMES: Yeah, 4K.

Part III

VICTOR SINGING EAGLE: Ladies and gentlemen, it’s that time again! Time for another brilliant lecture in Native American literature at Sisseton Wahpeton College! And now, the man, the myth, the legend, the brilliant professor Victor Singing Eagle! Yay!

MEGHNA: Super refreshing that he doesn’t start off his videos with “hey guys, welcome back to my channel!” His channel being DrSingingEagle on Youtube.

SINGING EAGLE: That’s spelled Singing Eagle, the way it sounds. (singing) S-I-N-G-I-N-G-E-A-G-L-E!

MEGHNA: Professor Victor Singing Eagle teaches at Sisseton Wahpeton College on the Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate of the Lake Traverse Reservation in South Dakota. Now, I’ll admit, I had never heard of this scholar and content creator, until he called us.

SINGING EAGLE: Professor of Native American literature and anthropology – have too many PHDs and not enough brains.

And as a former trucker, and professor of trucking right now, because I’m too old to be driving, YouTube kept me awake on the highway. No, I didn’t watch YouTube videos while I was supposed to be driving 80,000 pounds, but I did put on audiobooks.

YOUTUBE AUDIOBOOK: Penguin Random House Audio presents, There, There, by Tommy Orange. Indian head. There was an Indian head…

SINGING EAGLE: Now this is great to know. Because those other truckers who may be out there listening. Keep in mind: You can go into truck stops and cough up $25 for books on DVD or books on CD, whatever it’s called. Or you could just go to YouTube and plug in and pull up Harry Potter, you can pull up all of these audiobooks up.

YOUTUBE AUDIOBOOK: Harry looked behind him and saw a wrought iron archway where the barrier had been, with the words Platform 9 ¾ on it.

SINGING EAGLE: I also make a lot of videos for my students and upload them to e-learning.

This lovely book by Paula Gunn Allen called The Sacred Hoop, recovering The Feminine in American Indian Traditions.

I told you this before. Anyway.

And my students can watch my videos where I lecture and talk about Native American literature. And do interviews with prominent native authors.

It's important for us to know that Paula Gunn Allen is taking the emic perspective and she said, Hey, just a doggone minute. You don't know a dang thing about U.S. Indian.

So there you have it. Professor Victor Singing Eagle teaches at Sisseton Wahpeton College here at beautiful Downtown Bustling Agency Village South Dakota. Thanks, and have an awesome day. Talk to you later. Bye-bye.

CHAKRABARTI: Professor Victor singing Eagle. I'm looking at his channel right now, which by the way, is Dr.SingingEagle.

That's Dr. Singing Eagle, all one word. He's got 85 subscribers, and I actually spent a lot of time last night on his channel learning a whole heck of a lot about Native American literature. Everything from the feminist perspective in Native American literature as you heard him stay, to various creation stories across different tribal traditions.

On Point listeners, if you have any interest in this stuff. And it's super fascinating. As they say, smash that subscribe button. Let's give Dr. Singing Eagle a little bit of On Point love. Now Mark Bergen and Cam. But Mark, I'm gonna first turn to you. What's interesting to me is that I just now opened up YouTube in front of me and in the search bar I typed in Native American literature. Okay. And of course, a bunch of hits come up, but Dr. Singing Eagle, whose channel is literally about this and he's teaching it on his channel, it didn't come up at all in the search. Maybe I'd have to go through 50 different pages to find it.

And so I'm wondering, there's always this question of breaking through the algorithm. What do we know? This is a huge question, but what do we know about how YouTube's algorithm works and how it decides what content to present above the fold?

BERGEN: Yeah, you mentioned he had, I think, 85 subscribers. Is that right?

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah.

BERGEN: Yeah. I think that's one factor for sure. ... I think, this is a little bit like the Coca-Cola recipe for Google, right? Not like, they don't share it openly. And I think, and this is a bit complicated, they've been using these machine learning systems for almost the last decade that in some ways are a black box, is what some engineers describe it.

And so sometimes people inside the company don't really understand how these algorithms work. And there have been, and my book goes in a few series of moments, especially around kids' content, where they were just really weird. And sometimes deeply inappropriate, disturbing videos that the algorithm just loved to send people.

And there's not a lot of explanation, and in some ways, there are things like how often people click through and the algorithm is prized for what YouTube calls watch time, which is just basically like how long you're engaged with the video. And so those tend, certainly when your search results were probably like the videos that had the most watch time probably came to the top, but it's also influenced by your viewing history.

If you're logged in, where you are, however much Google knows about you and can guess about you. And that's always changing too. Like they're always tweaking the algorithm as well, which is for creators like Cam, it's incredibly hard to keep up with.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. Cam, so jump in here. How much do you, how much thought do you put into being successful within the algorithm when you post your content?

JAMES: Oh man, the algorithm. It runs your life to a degree when you're a professional creator. Because it's especially when you go full time, this is your income. And the amount of people that view each video is going to directly impact how much money you make that month.

And I can only make so many videos a month. So when you put that much work into something and you're preparing in every way you can, you're preparing the thumbnail, which I edit myself in Photoshop, and you're preparing the title for the video, which we have to workshop sometimes with the help of like other like programs just to see what other alternatives are there to what I can name this thing.

Because those two things, and what the title of the video is, heavily influence your click through rate, or how many people click on it based on as compared to how many people saw it in the first place. So that click through rate within the first hour, YouTube is telling us on the backend, in the YouTube studio app.

What your click through rate is, how it compares to the last video you released, where this video ranks in comparison to the last 10 you released. So pretty much within 30 to 45 minutes you can know, okay, I'm a failure. Like this video is a bomb. Nobody likes it. And all that two weeks I put into that, or even longer in some cases, is not really going to translate to income in this case.

So the algorithm rules everything to answer your question directly.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. I mean for those, the videos that aren't quote-unquote successful, they only bombed because, yeah, people didn't click. But that doesn't mean the content in and of itself wasn't --

JAMES: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. It's just as strong as the video you made two weeks ago. Is just that the algorithm decided for whatever reason, a combination of factors, as Mark mentioned, that it's not going to, even in some cases, show it to the people that subscribe to you. As you mentioned before, 116,000 people chose to press that button on my channel, and sometimes I'll release a video to this day, and it won't even show it to a large percentage of those people who chose to see my videos.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh wow. Okay. So Mark, so YouTube is a perfect example of a couple of different things that our digital world has allowed for. First of all, it's this democratizing effect, right? People have access now to the world that they didn't have before, both as consumers and creators.

But then, similarly, because of the algorithm, there is this sort of push towards algorithmic homogeneity, if I can call it that, right? Because like we already can parody like, Hey guys, welcome back to my channel, blah, blah, blah, all that. There's a certain like approach and look and tone that's become its own culture within YouTube.

But that's because those types of videos tend to have a lot of views.

BERGEN: Yeah, I think that's right. Some of that is the algorithm. Some of that is just the nature of YouTube and it's a little, this is, like we go back 20 years, it is pretty dramatic to think about a world now where there were no producers deciding what's the 8 p.m. slot on NBC, right?

Like what does well on cable television? And so a lot of creators in early YouTube, I think it's still the same. They're looking to see what does well and they're trying to imitate that. And so you saw unboxing videos is a perfectly, really interesting genre that came up, and especially with toys and once one's unboxing videos start to take off.

And then everyone else, a lot of other people jump in to make unboxing videos. And Mr. Beast is probably the world's biggest YouTuber. His style has now been replicated by countless number of other YouTubers who are trying to do the exact same thing, because something that Mr. Beast is doing is succeeding and getting an audience.

And so some of that is the algorithm. Some of that is just the function of this really fascinating media that doesn't have, to your point, it doesn't have anyone telling us what you should watch and who's programming what. We're in some of this free for all. Which makes it really interesting.

But it's, and sometimes we have really no clear direction where it's going.

CHAKRABARTI: Someone either already has or needs to write their PhD thesis on the unboxing video because it is so amazing to me that people will spend, they are compelling watching somehow like the idea of just like touching packaging and figuring out how wires are wrapped is like compelling watching.

But back to how people are served up information on YouTube. We actually asked Kurt Wilms. Again, he's senior director of product management there. Why it seems like YouTube's search is getting worse, and this is something that Google overall has been subject to the same criticism. For example, now when you put a search term in YouTube, you might see 10 or so videos that seem to match thematically your search, but then there's a bunch of other unrelated content after that. So here's what his answer was to that.

WILMS: We're constantly experimenting and evaluating and trying to improve it. Mainly our goal is to get the videos you're looking for in front of you as quickly as possible.

And so that's going to always be the goal of search. We also are getting more into personalizing your search results so you can see a generic search result. And then if you scroll down, we'll take all those search results and we'll try to modify it based on the types of things you watch.

So just filter out and make it more narrow. But really, search is all about giving you the videos you want, trying to show them to you, get them to you as quickly as possible. And so we're gonna continue to invest in making it better.

CHAKRABARTI: Cam James, what do you think about that?

JAMES: I think that YouTube's search is confusing.

It's confusing and that YouTube's proposed goal is to earn themselves more money. And you would think that they would prioritize accuracy of a search, relevancy of a search, and pair that with the videos that are the most popular. That would make sense on the surface, but it seems as if the constant tweaks to the algorithm or whatever that's being prioritized at YouTube HQ at any given moment leads them to make certain changes that don't line up with that goal.

Like, why are we serving these confusing search results or non-relevant search results to people's queries, when doing that is actively losing you money as a platform that you could be earning. That's a microcosm of the type of decisions that as creators we see impact us and impact our bottom line on a regular basis.

CHAKRABARTI: We've got a couple of minutes left here and I do want to spend some time talking about that darker side of YouTube, if I can put it that way. Now Mark, people like Cam are actually taking misinformation that's out there, and scams and lies and calling it out, right? And creating very compelling watching by saying, Hey this stuff is wrong.

You can't prove this, et cetera. But he can only do that because that exists and YouTube is one of the biggest, you talked about this earlier. It was one of the biggest sort of spreaders of disinformation and misinformation. That's why we had you on the show last time, a couple of years ago, because researchers had found that the algorithm was very quickly like putting up Nazi content.

If you left the auto play on, has that gotten any better?

BERGEN: I would say that YouTube has certainly put a lot more attention on that and the COVID pandemic was an inflection point, I think that they made some pretty major changes there as far as especially around videos around COVID-19, around vaccines, around virus, around health, that felt the consequences.

I think the first time the company kinda woke up to the consequences there. Of misinformation in people's lives. And to be frank, like they have faced a lot more pressure from politicians and regulators. And I think they've responded in both there, and certainly some of the like climate issues, flat earth, you mentioned earlier, those kind of conspiracies.

It is now we are under this new presidency, the company, like other social media companies are swinging back in a different direction where they have been accused on the right politically of censoring, of having a bias against conservative voices. And so I think they have been tapping the brakes on some of that and trying to strike the right balance.

And often the companies I M.O. is just stay out as much controversy as possible.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah, I was gonna say, whatever that balance is depends on who's in the White House.

BERGEN: Yeah, that's true. And YouTube has, and I talk about this in the book, has had this really beneficial relationships where Facebook has seen most of the ire from politicians, from regular people.

And YouTube has been this like sleeping giant in the world. That doesn't get a lot of tension.

CHAKRABARTI: Maybe it's because it's so ubiquitous that people don't even think about it.

BERGEN: I think that's probably true. It's like a utility. It's like the air, it's like the light that we turn on and we don't really think about that.

CHAKRABARTI: That is a good analogy actually, Mark. And so Cam, you're gonna get the last word here because we've only got about a minute left. YouTube has both helped you craft this new career, reach hundreds of thousands, hopefully millions of people, but it also, it's an unforgiving boss in terms of the algorithm.

Where would you like to see your career, vis-a-vis YouTube go from here.

JAMES: I've always been very particular about the content I make and who I'm intending to reach. I'm not a person who's tap dancing for the algorithm to try to maximize my viewership. I'm trying to make things that stand the test of time and leave a legacy with everybody that my content touches.

And so I'm not after wild growth. I don't want to be Mr. Beast. But I do want to continue to be able to support myself while also supporting a team in the future and just make things that can match the impact of Hollywood films, of indie documentaries and cover the topics that we aren't able to touch.

Sometimes that's very difficult given the algorithm and the restrictions that YouTube puts on us as creators. But I'm going to keep trying because this platform was built on that and I have no intention of changing what my promise to my viewers anytime soon.

The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.

The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.