YouTube turns five (5) years old and while some celebrate the fact that YouTube has reached 2 billion views per day, this vlogger feels its important to look at the people who helped YouTube get to where it is today: the vloggers.
While looking at videos to help frame my thought about YouTube turning 5 from a video-blogger perspective, I found a number of videos and blog posts that described a kind of video-blogger exodus from YouTube that started back in 2007.
Now I have uploaded videos on as many as eight different video distribution systems, but YouTube went from being my second favorite to my favorite because in "the old days" of 2006 and 2007, YouTube's website design encouraged vlogger interaction in a way that Blip.tv's website design did not do.
That caused a number of video-bloggers to emerge like Renetto, Kenrg, Gimmeabreakman, Nalts, and others. They were the pioneers. Renetto and Kenrg were on YouTube before me in 2006; YouTube was just launched in 2005. Vloggercon, a convention of vloggers, brought all of us together in 2006.
But something happened to really piss off a number of vloggers starting in 2007, and in retrospect, I think this funny video called God talks to me about YouTube by the one YouTuber Renetto, who YouTube has not celebrated during its birthday celebration, yet owes a lot of its early growth to, sums up what happened.
In this video created and uploaded on December 19th 2007, Renetto replays YouTube Founder Chad Hurley's words that "We're just creating a new market for distribution" and notes that YouTube dropped the "Broadcast Yourself" tagline from its main logo design. Renetto goes on to explain that YouTube's direction is to become a market for TV clips and says that YouTube was becoming essentially becoming less about community and more about control.
It's for that reason Renetto and Kenrg and a few others started a new website called Vloggerheads. They invited me to join in 2008; this was my video response thanking them for inviting me to Vloggerheads and pointing to the enormous level of racism on YouTube:
A number of people expanded their video distribution from, but did not quit YouTube, for that reason: Internet trolls. The people who sit down in cubicles at work or sit at home jobless drawing the government's money and waste that time and money writing nasty comments to creative people like me.
When I joined Vloggerheads there were 50 videos; now there are over 17,000 videos. It's growing and it will keep growing as more people fall in love with the method of using a camcorder to express their ideas in an online community. Some have left YouTube for sites like it and Blip.tv. I haven't quit YouTube. I'm here and plan to stay but some issues really need to be ironed out.
I think YouTube stumbled over a way to maintain community in a sea of shows and television clips, and that's what is being done with My YouTube Story: putting vlogs all in one page area for us to see.
That's a great start toward reestablishing community.
Stay tuned. I'm not done celebrating YouTube's 5th birthday and they still need to fix my channel!
No comments:
Post a Comment