Say “wardrobe malfunction,” and anyone old enough will immediately picture Janet Jackson at the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show. As Justin Timberlake sang, “I bet I’ll have you naked by the end of this song,” he tugged at Jackson’s costume and, for a fraction of a second, exposed her right breast to 114 million viewers. If you weren’t watching live, you missed it, and in those days, missing it meant it was gone. Except, in this case, it wasn’t.

About a year later, three young PayPal employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, were still talking about it, lamenting that there wasn’t an easy way to replay the moment. It was 2005. Social media barely existed. They decided they could build a platform where people could upload, store and share video clips easily. Within months, the world was talking about YouTube.

Janet’s “malfunction” may have brought personal embarrassment and corporate panic; it also hurt her career, but it helped catalyze a revolution, though one I confess I never saw coming. Discussing the new, oddly named YouTube on Britain’s SkyNews, I pointed out that it was becoming a repository for quirky videos, like a kitten grappling with a ball of wool, and would continue to grow, but how many quirky vids did we need? YouTube was only just beginning, though. From a collection of amateur uploads, it became the world’s dominant media treasury.

Today, YouTube has eclipsed Netflix as the service that audiences spend the most time watching, accounting for 13.1% of all TV viewing, compared to Netflix in second place with an 8.7% share, according to Nielsen. That means more people watch YouTube than Disney, Amazon Prime or any legacy broadcaster. It is the biggest podcast platform. It shapes music consumption. It is encroaching on live sport. And by the time YouTube takes over the Oscars broadcast in 2029, it won’t merely be streaming Hollywood: it will be part of it.

Zeitgeist in a bottle

Every so often, a company comes along that seems to have captured the zeitgeist in a bottle, like Nike. It found a niche in the sports apparel market in the 1970s, then recreated that market so that sneakers, tracksuits and baseball caps were no longer just for sports. I remember teaching a class at a US university where I worked in the 1990s and challenging anyone not wearing or carrying one piece of Nike apparel. Everyone was.

Likewise, Apple’s success was not just about elegant hardware but experience architecture: intuitive interfaces, seamless ecosystems and signature aesthetics that made its products desirable. Like Nike, Apple didn’t just capture market share: it set expectations for what technology should be and, in the process, built a new Apple market. Every new product it launches is an event in itself. In both cases, these companies expanded far beyond commerce. They formed new habits. Traditional market preferences ceased to be individual choices and became more like cultural defaults.

YouTube did not design and make products, nor did it create anything in particular. Its power lay in how it framed and presented what people watch and now expect from the media. Uploading a video of a toddler biting his older brother’s finger or an animated, pixelated flying cat with a Pop-Tart body leaving a rainbow trail, set to a repetitive, catchy tune, might not register many views without the imprimatur of YouTube. With it, both became internet sensations.

Gangnam Style 

YouTube’s early aspirations were modest: it simply provided an online warehouse for people to share their videos. But 18 months after its inception, Google saw its wider potential and acquired YouTube in what then seemed a prodigiously high $1.65 billion (£884 million) all-share deal. It effectively made YouTube one of the fastest internet success stories ever. That was 2006; a reorganization in 2015 brought YouTube under the ownership of Alphabet, a parent company.

In 2007, Google established the fundamentals of an unusual but effective internet business model. Instead of hosting and sharing videos created by amateur enthusiasts, it allowed producers to monetize their videos with advertising revenue. If the video failed to attract significant views, the producer paid nothing. If they made an impact, YouTube charged them and charged a commission. YouTube called it a partnership program.

By 2010, three things happened: YouTube matured into a stable, reliable streaming, global platform; smartphones arrived, making video portable; video became frictionless to share. And, as a result, billion-view counts became possible. YouTube’s first one was “Gangnam Style” by Psy in 2012. The global rise of K-pop followed later in the decade. In the 1990s and early 2000s, broadband penetration was still limited, mobile video didn’t exist and neither did social media amplification.

Later in the year, YouTube invested in original channels with a $100 million initiative to bring professionally produced content to the platform. This was an early step toward widening content beyond user uploads and an indication that YouTube had designs on the established television market: It rolled out 60 new channels, none of them owned by YouTube, but all producing original content. YouTube claimed 20 of the new channels generated more than a million views every week. But YouTube remained a distribution outlet rather than a production company.

This meant comparing YouTube with the likes of the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), Disney or Amazon was like comparing apples and oranges. NBC and practically every other major media company in history commission, finance, curate and sometimes produce original programs themselves. These can be expensive.

In 2008 (until 2013) AMC’s Breaking Bad was considered mid-to-high end at about $3-5 million per episode, but values have risen markedly in recent years. When HBO’s Game of Thrones began in 2011, each episode would have cost $3-6 million. By the time of its conclusion in 2019, this had risen to $15 million. Netflix’s Stranger Things (2016–present) is comparable. YouTube stayed resolutely out of production and focused only on hosting. 

Killing time and spending time

This encouraged critics not exactly to dismiss YouTube, but to contemplate its limitations. Ted Sarandos, Netflix co-chief executive, issued a put-down when he made the distinction: “There’s a difference between killing time and spending time.” Sarandos pointed out, “We’re in the how-you-spend-time business.” He said that he thought much of YouTube’s creator-made videos to be “snackable” content, compared with the professionally made shows and films available on his service.

Thing is: what if some of those “snacks” are like caviar-topped blinis or wagyu-and-white-truffle sliders — tiny, yes, but impossibly rich, intensely pleasurable and probably more desirable than the heavy multicourse banquets Netflix serves up. In other words, brevity doesn’t mean inferiority. Sometimes the smallest bites stay with us the longest.

The trouble for Netflix and indeed for all other major media corporations is that media appetites have evolved. A growing share of viewers actually want lots of small, intensely flavored portions instead of a sit-down multi-course feast. They don’t lack attention capabilities; they just don’t want to surrender their concentration for hours at a time. YouTube doesn’t fight that reality; If anything, it feeds on it.

Consider: audiences have been entertained since the rise of cinema in the 1920s by narratives that demand attentiveness for up to two hours, often longer. Film itself was modeled on plays, which in the 18th and 19th centuries were typically 2-3 hours long. Ancient Greek plays were often shorter, unless they were performed at festivals, in which case they could last for days. So, television has absorbed a cultural form that’s at least 2,500 years old. Few other aspects of culture are so enduring.

It surprises practically anyone over the age of 20, but long-form storytelling with a multiepisode arc, character development and conclusion may no longer have appeal. No, let me be blunter: may now be boring. The short-form, hook-driven snippets provided by YouTube may be the preferred format. YouTube vids can be full of highlights from sports, concerts and potentially anything; they can be prescriptive, demonstrating how to fix things, they can be reactions to practically any event, good or bad. And, perhaps surprisingly, YouTube mostly escapes the censorial criticism usually directed at Meta, X and TikTok. However, it has attracted concern over algorithms, misinformation and child safety, plus conspiracy rabbit holes, extremist content and ostensibly children’s cartoons that turn out to be genuine horrors.

The media, or “mass media” as it was in the early 20th century, dictated rather than cultivated social tastes, dispositions and appetites. Television introduced substantial changes, particularly in discovering and satisfying our passion for quiz and talk shows, and, at intervals, live sports, music videos and reality TV. Streamers have broken the linear stronghold, allowing viewers to choose when they watch, and devices let them choose where. Disney+ will soon invite viewers to participate in creating their own characters and plots and deploy AI to turn them into drama. The signs are that Gen Z has grown weary of traditions and wants an altogether different experience. Sarandos and other media execs are betting that this is temporary and maturity will restore more familiar preferences. Cultural taste is rarely so ineluctable. 

[Ellis Cashmore’s Celebrity Culture is published by Routledge]

[Kaitlyn Diana edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.