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In part two of How YouTube Ate TV, Fast Companys oral history of YouTube, we look at how the companys rapid ascent after its 2005 founding led to multiple challenges, from bandwidth costs to unhappy copyright holders. This prompted the startup to consider selling itself, and on October 9, 2006, Google announced that it would be buying it, for $1.65 billion. That deal came with the promise that the web giant would help YouTube scale up even further without micromanaging it. Eventually, the balance they struck between integration and independence paid off. But when YouTube was still a tiny, plucky startup, nobody was looking that far ahead. Read more How YouTube Ate TV Part one: YouTube failed as a dating site. This one change altered its fortunes forever Steve Chen, cofounderwith Chad Hurley and Jawed Karimof YouTube: I would take care of the product team, the engineering team, the technology side of it, building out this product. And [Hurley] would be managing finance, business development, and content partnerships, the legal side. But we always shared an office, or even shared a desk when we were small. Chris Maxcy, YouTube VP of business development (2005-2013): When I got hired, there were about 11 of us operating out of a back office in Sequoias offices. Then we moved to San Mateo to the infamous spot above the pizza shop. It was truly rat infested.Zahavah Levine, YouTube general counsel, chief counsel (2006-2011): On my first day, Steve handed me a sealed box from Ikea, and invited me to erect my desk. Oh yeah, he added, you might also want to order a computer online. Of the 23 employees, most were under the age of 25. At 37, I often felt like the adult in the room, and at times I felt like the corporate grandmother.Mia Quagliarello, YouTube senior product marketing manager, content and community (2006-2011): On my first day of work, I was seven months pregnant. There was an engineer sleeping on the couch. It really felt like a small family. Levine: I remember taking calls in the janitors closet when I needed privacy. Lyor Cohen, Warner Music Group CEO of recorded music (2004-2012); YouTube and Google global head of music (2016-present): It felt like an independent record company. No formality. Everybody in full motion. Jake McGuire, YouTube software engineer (2006-present): It was like, If something is going to blow up next week, then who cares? Well deal with it next week, because weve got something thats blowing up right now. It was actually kind of fun.Levine: There was a lot of interest in buying us, including from the same L.A. media companies that were threatening us with lawsuits.Maxcy: We had a number of overtures even very early on from large tech companies in the Valley. At the time, Chad and Steve were pretty adamant that they wanted to stay independent. McGuire: Chad and Steve had actually mentionedat an all-hands meeting with, I dont know, 40 people at the timethat they got an offer to sell the company for $500 million. And they turned it down. I just shouted out, You idiots! Why didn’t you take it? Tara Walpert Levy, Google ads director (2011-2021); VP, Americas at YouTube (2021-present): Back in 2005 I was consulting, mostly to large media networks. And I had advised one of them, passionately, to buy YouTube. They chose to go a different direction. How YouTube Shaped CultureHere It Goes Again, July 2006Rock band OK Go was founded in 1998, well before YouTube existed, but its eye-popping, single-shot music videos feel they were born to go viral on the site. Featuring beautifully choreographed treadmill choreography, Here It Goes Again was watched more than 50 million times before being yanked by EMI during a dispute with YouTube; after being restored, it racked up another 60 million-plus views. Multiple factors ultimately led the company to confront the possibility that it would need to be part of a larger organization to prosper. Levine: We couldnt keep up with the inquiries, content deals, takedown requests and legal threats, law enforcement subpoenas, press inquiries, infrastructure growth, hiring. It didnt stop.Dmitry Shapiro, founder and CEO, Veoh: They were blowing through millions of dollars a month in bandwidth costs. Maxcy: Wed wait for a server to get delivered, and then wed see this immediate spike in traffic once we got the new infrastructure installed. We knew there was a lot of demand, but we also knew we just couldn’t afford it. Chen: We were able to build a form of our own cloud in the various data centers around the U.S. But from a legal standpoint, it was just a big question mark. Levine: We had Mark Cuban in the press repeatedly insisting that YouTube wasnt worth a dime because of the copyright issues.Roelof Botha, former PayPal CFO and partner at Sequoia Capital, YouTubes first investor: Wed gone down for a meeting in Los Angeles with Universal Music, and it was probably the worst business meeting of our lives. They were pit bulls, and when you looked at the demands they had, it wouldnt benefit artists. I think the [YouTube] founders left feeling quite defeated, and so the prospect of an acquisition became far more attractive. Two tech behemoths quickly emerged as the most likely buyers. Chen: It was a big decision whether to move forward with Yahoo or Google. Google was still the search engine, and Yahoo was everything else. Botha: Yahoo was maybe the more natural acquirer because it had media experience and [former Warner Bros. co-CEO] Terry Semel was leading the company. But some of the dysfunction of the company was starting to show up in its ineptitude in landing the opportunity. Maxcy: Google had the infrastructure, they had the know-how, they had the capital to really make it work. How YouTube Shaped Culture Charlie Bit My FingerAgain!, May 2007Charlie, an English 1-year-old, chomps on his 3-year-old brother Harrys finger. Nobody is injured in the process, and millions of viewers find it adorably hysterical. Countless YouTubers riff on the duos videoincluding, a decade later, the brothers themselves. Chen: What we liked about Google was not so much on the financial side. Eric Schmidt, the CEO, took me and Chad aside and basically told us, Weve been doing all these things with Google Video to try to compete, but theres some magic vibe within this YouTube group and community. We want to make sure that through this acquisition, we dont do anything to decelerate that. If anything, we should be here to help. Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google (2001-2011): YouTube was the clear winner when it came to the social side of online video. It wasnt just about watching clips. It was about community, sharing, and connection. Thats what really drew us to the company. John Harding, Google software engineer (2005-2007); YouTube engineering manager, director, VP (2007-present): Most of us on Google Video were infrastructure-focused. YouTube had this great consumer product. We all immediately saw, Okay, this is actually a perfect match. Schmidt: They were right about the product, and we were right about how to scale it. Levine: I think it took five days from signing the term sheet to signing the long-form agreement. I was operating on pure adrenaline. Maxcy: The day of the acquisition, we were moving into new offices in San Bruno. Chads car was broken, so we rode to work together in mine. We show up and there are satellite trucks outside the building, and its this entire circus. Quagliarello: I was about to go get lunch and leave the building. My manager’s like, “You might wanna stay here for this. McGuire: My phone started blowing up with all these text messages. Theyd announced we got bought. We all went to TGI Fridays on the other side of the parking lot at the end of the night to celebrate. Google honored its pledge to provide YouTube with resources while letting it chart its own course. Suzie Reider, YouTube CMO (2006-2013): Chad [became] co-CEO with a longtime Googler named Salar [Kamangar], and they sat together in an office. I think Google did a good job of helping us come into the fold. McGuire: They had one of their cafés in Mountain View cook lunch and they would drive it up in a van and serve it in our basement every day. Chen: Wed been stumbling into hurdles when it came to search, recommendations on videos, internationalization. We were able to decide where we thought the most help was needed to continue the growth of YouTube as a platform. How YouTube Shaped Culture CNN/YouTube Presidential Debate, July 2007 YouTubers get face time with Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and other Democratic candidates with the services first-ever debate livestream. The Republican contenders follow in November. Harding: There was a lot of quick triage: Okay, what’s in the most risky shape, and how quickly can we get those things moved onto the Google infrastructure that’s more scalable? Search was one of the first things, and then pretty quickly after that we moved the video processing. McGuire: Google previously had a strategy of making all their acquisitions rewrite their stuff in the Google way. I don’t know if they decided that wasn’t working out for them, but we were the first people who were not given that advice. They did send over a small number of engineers who were almost all pretty good. But even then, they were just trying to work with what we had. Chen: That’s very different from what we thought would happen if Yahoo had been the acquiring group. We wanted to really avoid what happened with eBay and PayPal. Billy Biggs, Google/YouTube software engineer (2006-present): After [Google] bought the company, I saw that some of the technical choices they made were very elegant. It was a master class in learning how to scale. The motherships influence did grow over time. Quagliarello: They said, Nothing’s going to change. You guys keep doing what you’re doing. It felt like that for about a year. But then it was pretty clear that things were going to change. There was more rigor and discipline around goals and OKRs. It just became more hierarchical. Matthew Darby, YouTube director of product management (2008-present): There’s definitely a lot of the Google culture that got imbued into YouTube. It’s a very analytical, very engineering-driven culture, very rigorous. Its hard to know whether YouTube on its own would’ve been quite the same. Reider: For me, it was calming, because I’d worked in larger organizations and I was used to a little more rigor and structure. I think it was hard for people who had never worked for a big company like that before. But we needed it. Three months after Google acquired YouTube, Apple announced the iPhone, pitching video-watching as a core feature. When the phone shipped in 2007, it had YouTube onboard. Googles own mobile platform, Android, made YouTube even more of a strategic asset. Harding: In 2007 and 2008, it wasn’t obvious that mobile was going to become what it did. Biggs: It was truly unclear whether people would really want to watch a lot of video on their phone, or whether that was just not going to be a thing. Chen: There was no SDK for third-party iPhone apps. Apple reached out to us to say, We think in order for the iPhone to be fully demonstrated, it needs to have YouTube on it. And so we were the only third-party company that rolled out with the initial set of apps that came with the iPhone. Harding: We had a couple weeks to build the YouTube app for the iPhone, in partnership with the Apple team, before they had to send it off to manufacturing. I was like, I know exactly how to do that. I’ve already built this for Google Video, but nobody wants it. Chen: We had to make sure that all the videos that we had were transcoded to be streamed on their video player. It just completely took off. Darby: There was a concerted effort to get everybody at Google to think about mobile first. Android ended up sort of eating the entire world, and YouTube rode along that. In the wake of the oogle acquisition, YouTubes cultural influence was already extraordinary and still growing. It was reflected in everything from a TV ad that repurposed a YouTube videos Chicken McNuggets rap to the U.S. presidential campaign. Chris Edwards, Arnold Worldwide creative director (1999-2012): A colleague of mine shared a link to the video with a comment saying, What do they need us for anymore? I thought, Shit, this would make a great 30-second [McDonalds] spot. It got over a million views in the first few weeksback in 2007 that was a lot!and tons of comments and copycats doing parody videos on YouTube. We did local TV buys in three markets, and McNuggets sales shot up an average of 42%. Chen: YouTube did a collaboration with CNN for the Democratic and Republican [primary] debates. Instead of having a bunch of panelists speaking into the camera for the questions, they had them coming from YouTube creators. I remember traveling to Charleston and appearing with Anderson Cooper. I was like, We’ve reached the pinnacle of anything that YouTube can do. But this was just 2007. Additional reporting by María José Gutiérrez Chávez, Yasmin Gagne, and Steven Melendez.
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It is a sad fact of online life that users search for information about suicide. In the earliest days of the internet, bulletin boards featured suicide discussion groups. To this day, Google hosts archives of these groups, as do other services. Google and others can host and display this content under the protective cloak of U.S. immunity from liability for the dangerous advice third parties might give about suicide. Thats because the speech is the third partys, not Googles. But what if ChatGPT, informed by the very same online suicide materials, gives you suicide advice in a chatbot conversation? Im a technology law scholar and a former lawyer and engineering director at Google, and I see AI chatbots shifting Big Techs position in the legal landscape. Families of suicide victims are testing out chatbot liability arguments in court right now, with some early successes. Who is responsible when a chatbot speaks? When people search for information online, whether about suicide, music or recipes, search engines show results from websites, and websites host information from authors of content. This chain, search to web host to user speech, continued as the dominant way people got their questions answered until very recently. This pipeline was roughly the model of internet activity when Congress passed the Communications Decency Act in 1996. Section 230 of the act created immunity for the first two links in the chain, search and web hosts, from the user speech they show. Only the last link in the chain, the user, faced liability for their speech. Chatbots collapse these old distinctions. Now, ChatGPT and similar bots can search, collect website information, and speak out the resultsliterally, in the case of humanlike voice bots. In some instances, the bot will show its work like a search engine would, noting the website that is the source of its great recipe for miso chicken, for example. When chatbots appear to be just a friendlier form of good old search engines, their companies can make plausible arguments that the old immunity regime applies. Chatbots can be the old search-web-speaker model in a new wrapper. But in other instances, it acts like a trusted friend, asking you about your day and offering help with your emotional needs. Search engines under the old model did not act as life guides. Chatbots are often used this way. Users often do not even want the bot to show its hand with web links. Throwing in citations while ChatGPT tells you to have a great day would be, well, awkward. The more that modern chatbots depart from the old structures of the web, the further away they move from the immunity the old web players have long enjoyed. When a chatbot acts as your personal confidant, pulling from its virtual brain ideas on how it might help you achieve your stated goals, it is not a stretch to treat it as the responsible speaker for the information it provides. Courts are responding in kind, particularly when the bots vast, helpful “brain” is directed toward aiding your desire to learn about suicide. Chatbot suicide cases Current lawsuits involving chatbots and suicide victims show that the door of liability is opening for ChatGPT and other bots. A case involving Googles Character.AI bots is a prime example. Character.AI allows users to chat with characters created by users, from anime figures to a prototypical grandmother. Users could even have virtual phone calls with some characters, talking to a supportive virtual nana as if it were their own. In one case in Florida, a character in Game of Thrones, Daenerys Targaryen, persona allegedly asked the young victim to come home to the bot in heaven before the teen shot himself. The family of the victim sued Google. Parents of a 16-year-old allege that ChatGPT contributed to their sons suicide. The family of the victim did not frame Googles role in traditional technology terms. Rather than describing Googles liability in the context of websites or search functions, the plaintiff framed Googles liability in terms of products and manufacturing akin to a defective parts maker. The district court gave this framing credence despite Googles vehement argument that it is merely an internet service, and thus the old internet rules should apply. The court also rejected arguments that the bots statements were protected First Amendment speech that users have a right to hear. Though the case is ongoing, Google failed to get the quick dismissal that tech platforms have long counted on under the old rules. Now, there is a follow-on suit for a different Character.AI bot in Colorado, and ChatGPT faces a case in San Francisco, all with product and manufacture framings like the Florida case. Hurdles for plaintiffs to overcome Though the door to liability for chatbot providers is now open, other issues could keep families of victims from recovering any damages from the bot providers. Even if ChatGPT and its competitors are not immune from lawsuits and courts buy into the product liability system for chatbots, lack of immunity does not equal victory for plaintiffs. Product liability cases require the plaintiff to show that the defendant caused the harm at issue. This is particularly difficult in suicide cases, as courts tend to find that, regardless of what came before, the only person responsible for suicide is the victim. Whether itsan angry argument with a significant other leading to a cry of why dont you just kill yourself, or a gun design making self-harm easier, courts tend to find that only the victim is to blame for their own death, not the people and devices the victim interacted with along the way. But without the protection of immunity that digital platforms have enjoyed for decades, tech defendants face much higher costs to get the same victory they used to receive automatically. In the end, the story of the chatbot suicide cases may be more settlements on secret, but lucrative, terms to the victims families. Meanwhile, bot providers are likely to place more content warnings and trigger bot shutdowns more readily when users enter territory that the bot is set to consider dangerous. The result could be a safer, but less dynamic and useful, world of bot products. Brian Downing is an assistant professor of law at the University of Mississippi. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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E-Commerce
A few years ago, I received some news Id been longing to hear: The first book Id ever written received an offer from a publisher. My childhood dream of becoming an author looked set to become a reality. It was six oclock in the eveningthe ideal time for a celebratory drink with my colleagues. But I didnt tell anyone the news. I thought my excitement would be seen as bragging. So I kept my mouth shut. If only Id known about the concept of Mitfreude: a German term for the vicarious joy people can feel at anothers happiness. According to recent research, we are needlessly cautious about sharing good news, because we fear it will provoke boredom, irritation, or envy in others. Yet Mitfreude is surprisingly commonand sharing our happier moments can improve our mood, strengthen our relationships with our colleagues, and boost our reputation within our professional network. ‘Joying’ with someone Mitfreude (which literally translates as joying with) comes from philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, a man not typically known for a cheery worldview. And yet he once wrote: To imagine the joy of others and to rejoice at it is the highest privilege of the highest animals. You could see Mitfreude as the opposite of Schadenfreude, our joy at others misfortune. Studies confirm that there are many benefits to joying with another person. In the psychological literature, Mitfreude is often known by the more technical term capitalization: the idea that we can amplify our happiness from a positive event by sharing it with people we like. We can see this in studies tracking day-to-day changes in peoples emotions. After a conversation in which one person recounts a success or good fortune, the speaker gets to relive the positive experience while the other person enjoys a vicarious mood boost. Crucially, the warm feelings that arise also strengthen social bonds. In close relationships, it fosters trust and intimacy, explains Trevor Watkins, an assistant professor of management at the University of Oklahoma who has examined capitalization in the workplace. Sharing our successes can also enhance our reputation with our peers: Among coworkers, it offers the opportunity to foster inspiration, he says. The result is an amplification of our initial happiness: We derive even more benefit from the positive events than if we had let them passively come and go, says Watkins. Thats why its called capitalization. Unfortunately, many of us do not recognize these benefits. So we tend to keep our happiness to ourselves. How concealing positivity can backfire In a survey by Annabelle Roberts, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Texas at Austin, her research team found that 80% of participants reported having concealed a success from people around them, like a promotion at work. Participants wanted to avoid provoking jealousy or creating awkwardness in a conversation. They thought they were being sensitive. In reality, it is the act of hiding a successand blocking opportunities for Mitfreudethat is most likely to elicit bad outcomes. Roberts and her colleagues asked participants to consider the hypothetical story of two work friends who are both looking for a new job: One gets asked to give a presentation to a potential employer, but neglects to tell his friend, despite them having discussed their job hunts. There could be multiple explanations for his behavior (including sheer forgetfulness), but the participants saw it as an act that erodes trust. As a result, the participants responded that they would be far less likely to share personal information about themselves with such a colleagueor to collaborate with him in the future. Sharing positive things about ourselves does a lot for connection, says Todd Chan, who conducted research into the benefits of perceived bragging for his PhD at the University of Michigan. Its not that people forget that friends might be happy for them. Its more that theyre disproportionately focused on the risk of things like envy. In reality, close friends mostly do feel joy for us. How to share joy (without bragging) Mitfreude can have caveats: Watkins has found that sharing good news is far less likely to bring vicarious joy in competitive workplaces, where it can breed envy and resentment. Fortunately, the research offers some tips to increase the chances that you will meet Mitfreude rather than envy in any situation. The first is the law of reciprocity. Lukasz Kaczmarek, who heads the Social Psychology Centre at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań, Poland, has shown that people often keep note of the ways that you have responded to their good news. This then shapes how theyll react to good news of your own. Conveying that enthusiasm will return to you as a boomerang, Kaczmarek says. Every time you show that your behavior has changed, it produces a change in your partner. Where possible, you might also attempt to build up others alongside yourselfa strategy known as dual promotion. You might compliment someones organizational skills while describing your creative contributions to a project, for example. The fact you’ve said something good about someone else shows that you must be a warm person, says Eric VanEpps, an associate professor of marketing at Vanderbilt University who conducted this research. Finally, you might try to talk about some of the challenges youve faced. In a study of entrepreneurs presentations, people who described past obstacles or mistakes were considered to be less conceited, and more inspiring, than those who spoke only of their triumphs. With time, greater awareness of Mitfreude and its benefits may help us all to create a more positive culture. Shying away from sharing good news creates like a void that then just is cluttered with bad news, says VanEpps. It’s nice to hear good things happen to good people.
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E-Commerce
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