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YouTube is about to hit 75 million videos. At the beginning of February, it had 70 million.
YouTube told me recently that 10 hours of new video are uploaded every minute. And that every day, the site gets in its words “hundreds of thousands" of new videos.
On a real red letter day I’ll watch maybe 25 videos (and remember, it’s my job). But if you figure 200,000 a day get put up on YouTube that’s about one-hundredth of one per cent.
The videos most of us watch are the ones that have tipped into the mainstream the bizarre, hilarious or sensational most-viewed clips that have become today’s preferred water-cooler fodder.
But those videos are just a pinch of sand from a mile-long beach the tiniest, least representative fraction of what gets uploaded every day. What YouTube is truly made of is the stuff no one ever sees stuff not meant for, or wanted by, the public.
The sheer mathematical unlikelihood of any single video getting more than a few views especially if there’s nothing special about it provides users with a kind of safety-in-numbers. A lost-in-the-crowd type of privacy.
Everything and nothing
And in many ways, that privacy is real. The internet is such a search-oriented medium that happening upon something you’re not already looking for and that isn’t already popular or featured somewhere else is exceedingly rare. We all stumble upon content we didn’t expect to find but it’s usually the same content everyone else is stumbling on.
Just so for YouTube, and the thousands of people who upload videos of their toddler dancing every day must intuitively understand this. Many of us would tut at the notion of putting a photo of our child on the open internet. But really: How is anyone ever going to know it’s there?
The de facto privacy is even stronger if you leave out identifying information. So if someone searches your child’s name, it won’t match the video. The only way to find it is to know its web address.
Well, there’s one other way. Before videos sink into the abyssopelagic depths of YouTube, you can catch a glimpse of them by simple dint of their being brand new. If you search YouTube for “*" the asterisk is computer-speak for everything and then order the results by date, you’ll get a list of the newest videos from around the world. Now instead of being the millionth person to see a vid, you could be the first.
And you might be the only.
Hiding amid all the junk and noise, then, is a truth that doesn’t get much attention: Despite the hand wringing of people concerned that YouTube is polluting, diluting and dumbing down our culture, turning us all into attention-deficit-disordered attention-whores, in the main, people aren’t using YouTube to perform, or to make a splash, or to be discovered. They’re using it for personal stuff.
This isn’t entirely surprising. When Johnny takes his first steps, being able to e-mail family members a link to the YouTube video is easier than burning the footage onto DVDs and mailing it to five addresses.
The second major use of YouTube appears to be as a kind of personal video scrapbook, in which people keep the little video clippings we’ve all begun to generate.
In this category, mobile phone videos reign. Because almost everyone’s got a video camera in their pocket now, we can instantly satisfy the primal desire to record anything even slightly out of the ordinary.
Mobile mania
Mankind and his ready camera are generating billions of bad snapshot and snap-videos a year. A philosophical question for our time is: Once you’ve seen the boring 30-second video you took, why would you still go to the trouble of uploading it to the internet?
It seems as if every third YouTube video is a short shot of a crowd dancing at a concert, or a guy sliding down a snowy hill on a trash-can lid (not fast), or a big brother wrestling his little brother to the ground, or someone getting on the subway.
It’s probably time to stop treating YouTube as if it’s nothing but talking cats, funky video bloggers and clips from last night’s Moment of Truth. That is a minuscule and unrepresentative sample of what the site truly contains.
Because what YouTube contains is “*": everything.
YouTube’s founding idea is that video doesn’t like being trapped in a physical container. It wants to be communicated, watched, enjoyed. So it’s only natural that all the video in the world is migrating to the only place everyone can see it. Even if no one ever does.
Priceless moments
In between those clips of a living statue you filmed on your vacation and a video of a cat clinging to a turning ceiling fan, there are some videos so brilliant, captivating or just plain weird that they've brought their makers a dose of semi-fame.
Some manage to be topical Amber Lee Ettinger (aka Obama Girl and a former Miss New York) achieved a degree of celebrity with her role in the I Got a Crush... on Obama video, appearing on US comedy show Saturday Night Live (Taryn Southern did the same with Hott4Hill, appearing on a number of US news programmes).
Others are exposes of real-life madness: See Chan Yuet Tung's Bus Uncle (in which an irate Hong Kong bus passenger's rant was captured on a mobile phone). The video lead to a Hong Kong media frenzy, with rewards offered to uncover the identity of the foul-mouthed Bus Uncle.
But, thankfully, every once in a while, a clip appears which achieves both topicality and insanity. Three words: Leave Britney Alone!
And luckily, YouTube, that great celebrator of the obscure, was there as a platform for Miss Teen South Carolina when she thoughtfully reminded the world that “some, people out there in our nation don't have maps and… I believe that they should, our education over here in the US should help the US, uh, or, uh, should help South Africa and should help the Iraq and the Asian countries…"
Sometimes, even celebrities and public figures strike it lucky. Remember these?
-Sarah Silverman’s Matt Damon
- Alanis Morissette’s cover of My Humps
-Justin Timberlake’s Special Box
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