YouTube's History and Impact

    YouTube has become the website/app everyone goes to these days for watching videos. But interestingly enough, the website actually got its start as a dating site. In 2004, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim got the idea of creating a dating website where users could share videos of themselves. But the creators soon found that this idea wasn't very popular, so they pivoted their idea. Instead of a dating site, YouTube would be a place to share all kinds of videos. 

    The first video on this new website was called "Me at the Zoo", which was essentially a vlog of one of the creators' days at the zoo. This was used by the creators to test the site itself and with the success of that, YouTube officially launched in November 2005. The number of users exploded, and hundreds of videos were being uploaded every day. People couldn't get enough of this new site. 

    In the next couple of years, YouTube gained partnerships with tons of major companies like Verizon and Google. By the summer of 2006, YouTube was serving more than 100 million videos per day, and it has not stopped there. Today, YouTube has 1.7 billion unique monthly visitors and is the second most-visited website on the Internet, behind Google. It is safe to say that YouTube has become an integral part of our Internet-centric lives. 

    As mentioned in class, there are both positive and negative impacts to YouTube. One of the positives is that there is an endless amount of information on YouTube. Anything you could want to find out about can be found there. For that reason, it is an amazing site for learning new things. There are hundreds of videos on every topic imaginable that can help people learn skills they have always wanted to learn, pick up a new hobby, or just educate people. My dad once needed to figure out how to defog the front lights on his car, and he was able to figure that out just by searching on YouTube. 

    Another positive is that YouTube is free. Yes, there are ads, which can be annoying, but ads are everywhere, so that is not out of the ordinary to see. But the best part about the site is that all the videos are free (with some minor expectations because YouTube now rents movies). This means any music you want to listen to that has a music video is also free. YouTube is almost like a library, but instead of books, it has videos. This means anyone can access it, enjoy it, and learn new things. 

    There are also some negatives to the site though too. One of the more recent issues people have had with YouTube is that the company has been censoring videos. The issue is that some people don't think their videos should be censored for various reasons. Some people claim YouTube is censoring ideas it doesn't like or that there are "content warnings" in place when there is actually no sensitive content in the video. It has led a lot of people to be upset with the website. 

YouTube has also been known to lead to bad habits. A lot of young people spend their days watching videos on YouTube instead of focusing on schoolwork or other important tasks. It can lead to harmful levels of procrastination and laziness, which can then negatively affect people's lives. It is similar to the issues I brought up with Netflix and binge-watching, where doing this for too long can negatively impact people's health and mental state. 

    So, while YouTube has become its own video library open to the public and has many great aspects to it, it is not perfect. And just like how we have to be careful with other media websites, we need to be careful with our use of YouTube too.