20 years of YouTube: Viral videos and German education

YouTube appeared on the internet 20 years ago. Although the first video wasn't uploaded until weeks later, today is still the anniversary date. We took this as an opportunity to talk to Roya Zeitoune, Culture and Trends Manager at YouTube in London, who knows how the platform has changed. Viral videos? There are hardly any left. But not only, but especially Germans have a penchant for educational videos. And while the world is worried that artificial intelligence (AI) could be misused, says Zeitoune, the creative use of the technology is what we see most.

What is the most trending video right now worldwide?

The majority of the trending videos are discussing the Super Bowl halftime show that happened and very few people are talking about the actual game. They're all discussing the incredible artistry that there was behind Kendrick Lamar's show. I think because YouTube is such a visual medium, the ability to analyze this in depth and to explain it lends itself so well. The fact that people are used to longer videos, so some of these deep dives are really thorough, we're getting some of them on YouTube close to an hour long of people discussing all the amazing nuances to the performance.

It's a very hot topic. You also get people who live-streamed their reactions. So people who are watching it and were reacting in real time, which is a very popular format on YouTube. But there were also the deep dives immediately afterwards. Like within hours, people were doing these like HD-style forensic analyses. But then you also get the short-form cutaways where people do the memes, where people are recreating moments from the show, et cetera.

Was it trending in Germany, too?

Yes, definitely. I mean, right now on number one is not an essay on it, but just the halftime performance of Kendrick Lamar is currently on number one on trending in Germany. It is interesting, the exact numbers of people who actually prefer watching an event through the lens of a creator rather than watching it themselves is 66 percent actually. The majority of people say they would prefer to watch a creator analyse and break down an event than watch the event itself. It's always been part of YouTube's culture, but it really emerged quite dominantly in the last few years.

We see this all the time with music, with film reactions, with sports games. But it's also really coming through in terms of people trying to understand what's going on with politics. That's been a huge thing, particularly in the last couple of years where things have felt quite unwieldy, where again people are trying to understand things and get the nuance.

There's also the aspect where the news cycle and the trend cycle is so rapid now, it is really, really difficult for people to keep up. Sometimes people don't even have time to actually experience the things in depth themselves. So they're looking for kind of a shortcut of people explaining things and interpreting things for them. And it's really interesting because that sort of talking through things, the video essay approach is really big in Germany, actually, and I think Germans tend to step back and analyse.

In Germany there's so much of a spirit of self-edification at all times. And so, that genre of YouTube content is really buzzing on Germany and has been for a couple of years now. This is a phenomenon that is a global phenomenon, but you see it really over-indexed in Germany. It's fascinating because when we come to the end of year lists every year, every year that we ever look at those lists, in Germany, the list often includes these kind of erudite academic approaches to understanding the world, which are popular in other countries, but they rarely get to the top 10 of the most consumed pieces of content.

Do you think it's a generation thing, too?

Interesting that you say that. I don't actually think it's particular to young people. That's another point that I think is really interesting that people often talk about people having no attention span and young people just wanting to watch short videos. It's not at all the case. There is a huge popularity of short form, but there's just as much growth happening in long form, particularly among young people. I do think you're right that a lot of them do come to understand the world through YouTube, but actually, it's not confined to younger generations.

We see this across the board of people coming to learn from YouTube. I think for me, the popularity of short form is less to do with attention span. I think it is more to do with the immediate of the content, because there's a lower barrier to entry with short form, people don't feel as much pressure to make it a higher production value and make it look so polished, because there's a kind of conversational aspect to it, that people come to short form to be part of that conversation, because people make videos really, really fast in the moment that it is happening.

Everybody watched the Halftime Show but are there still YouTube videos that everybody watched like years ago there was this "Charlie bit my finger"-video for example?

You're absolutely right that our watching patterns have really shifted. We used to have these huge collective moments that everybody would recognize. Peoples viewing behavior has become way more personalized now. It is much rarer to get these so-called viral moments.

We find this around the things that people are choosing to watch. Because you can find absolutely everything and you can go deep on everything, the breadth of things that are popular is so wide now that when we talk about fandoms there's another really interesting stat that we found: 64 percent of people consider themselves a really big fan of something that nobody they know in real life is a fan of. Even to the point that when we produce our end of year lists and we look at the biggest videos in each market, in many cases, those biggest videos, a lot of people might not have seen, whereas back in the days, like you said, everybody would have. But everybody is watching what is important to them now. That personalisation is a really cool thing because it means that culture is totally people-powered and you'll find what matters to you. It does mean that we've lost a little bit of those moments of collective joy.

Back in the day when I was growing up, the number one song on the charts, everyone had heard. But now actually, it's not the case.

You just said music. Are there still a lot of music videos?

Oh, huge, huge. They happen all the time. Most regularly music videos are released on Fridays, and Fridays you look at the trending charts and it's really dominated by music. YouTube is a very natural home for people looking to enjoy music now. But again, it's the kind of halo surrounding content of people will make a music video and then people will discuss that in so many different ways. The music videos themselves are a big moment, absolutely, but there's so much of it – is the dance trends that come off it, the reaction videos that come off it, the discussions, etc.

It's exactly that, which makes culture so much more interesting because we have stopped being just passive consumers. We are now actively thinking about things. So there's a much more participatory nature to culture now where people want to be part of it. They are commenting, they are sharing, they are being part of the whole moment, which again is so very different from when YouTube really burst onto the scene 20 years ago. Until that point, you were very much just watching and seeing what was happening around you. You weren't part of the moment and I think that is something that has accelerated in the last few years, definitely, and short-form video is another way that really facilitates this, but I think that co-creation to a degree is a really exciting evolution.

How professional is YouTube? How many people are professionals, creators, and how many people are still just private people uploading some videos?

There's a real mix. It's a really decent proportion in that they're people who are full-time, that's their entire income, and then people who are making a lot of money from doing it. The creator economy is a massive part of culture now across the world. I'd say in Germany and in developed markets, the revenue that they can make as an income stream is huge. It's because our advertising is so sophisticated in developed countries. Even among these channels that we were talking about that react to culture, a lot of them would consider themselves professional fans now because that is what they do. This is their entire job.

You get a real mix of some absolutely phenomenally impressive channels where they are making really well-researched, sometimes really high-production value content. To give you an example, I had this moment where I suddenly felt very ashamed of myself that I didn't know more about philosophy. I used to read quite a lot of philosophy and I really have let that go. I was looking on YouTube to try and understand the basics of philosophy and I found so many channels that were so fantastic and so well-researched. Videos that were an hour long discussions of Nietzsche versus Schopenhauer. Some of these videos had millions and millions of views and were truly fantastic pieces of work.

These are our creators who have found what really matters to them and they found their audiences that really matters to other people too. And so I think that is the kind of joyful beauty of YouTube in that as a creator, generally speaking, the things that have worked for them is always when they really focus on what they do actually care about. Not when they're looking to become big or they're looking to be famous. They just start creating content about the stuff that matters to them. And so through that authenticity of enthusiastically covering something that you care about, you're able to make this your career, which is wonderful. So there's international hero case studies, like there's a lobster fisher in Maine who has a million strong following. In the UK, there's a pool cleaner who has got the majority of his income come via his content of cleaning other people's pool. And then obviously in Germany with a strong trades culture, there's fantastic account. We've got several car mechanic and tuning shops that show up on our trending list every single week whenever they upload new content, and we are having an eye on a really interesting wine farmer at the moment whose content channel is growing rapidly in audiences.

How did AI already change YouTube?

I think a lot of people get very nervous about AI. Us too, as a company. I went to Washington and I was speaking to a bipartisan group of regulators and politicians about AI and what we're seeing on YouTube to help them understand and to invite them to regulate AI hopefully because we also need proper guardrails. But when I was doing all the research, and we continue to research AI a lot on YouTube, something that I find really reassuring is that actually we aren't seeing people use it for nefarious, scary things. What we're generally seeing is people using it really creatively. You see such fun iterations. There's a channel that I think actually might be German called Demon Flying Fox, which is amazing, where they use AI in really funny ways where they re-imagine different characters. Creators use AI, but in ways that aren't immediately obvious to us. They might use AI to select the best thumbnail for their video, or to come up with a compelling title for their video. Honestly, we don't see things that, so far, we haven't seen things that concern me with the use of AI. We're keeping a very, very close look on it, but it is just being used in wonderfully creative ways at the moment.

(emw)