“Oh man, you gotta see this video…”

Everyone loves YouTube, or at least the numbers suggest so; the total number of siteviews they’ve racked up must number in the low trillions, the most popular video on the site (of course it’s still Gangnam Style) has over one billion views, and YouTube has indeed become so ubiquitous that if a video of something cannot be found there then it probably doesn’t exist.

Indeed, YouTube’s ubiquity is perhaps the most surprising, or at least interesting thing about it; YouTube is certainly not the only and wasn’t even the first large-scale video hosting site, being launched in 2005, a year after Vimeo (the only other such site I am familiar with) and well after several others had made efforts at video-sharing. It was the brainchild of three early employees of PayPal, Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim and Steve Chen. A commonly reported story (that is frequently claimed to be not true), the three had recorded video at a dinner party but were having difficulty sharing it online, so being reasonably gifted programmers decided to build the service themselves. What actually happened has never really been confirmed, but the first video (showing Karim at San Diego zoo; yes, perhaps it wasn’t the most auspicious start) went up in April 2005, of course, is history.

To some, YouTube’s meteoric rise might be considered surprising, or simply the result of good fortune favouring them over some other site. Indeed, given that Apple computers used not to be able to display videos using the Adobe Flash video format used by the site, it’s remarkable (and a testament to Microsoft’s dominance of the PC market for so many years) that the site was able to take off as it did. However, if one looks closely then it isn’t hard to identify the hallmarks of a business model that was born to succeed online, and bears striking hallmarks to the story of Facebook; something that started purely as a cool idea for a website, and considered monetisation something of a secondary priority to be dealt with when it came along. The audience was the first priority, and everything was geared to maximising the ability of users to both share and view content freely. Videos didn’t (and still don’t) have to be passed or inspected before being uploaded to the site (although anything flagged by users as inappropriate will be watched and taken down if the moderators see fit to do so), there is no limit on the amount that can be watched or uploaded by a user and there is never any need to pay for anything. YouTube understands the most important thing about the internet; it is a place with an almost infinite supply of stuff and a finite amount of users willing to surf around and look for it. This makes the value of content to a user very low, so everything must be done to attract ‘customers’ before one can worry about such pesky things as money. YouTube is a place of non-regulation, of freedom; no wonder the internet loves it.

The proof of the pudding is, of course, in the money; even as early as November 2005 Sequoia Capital had enough faith in the company (along with superhuman levels of optimism and sheer balls) to invest over $11 million in the company. Less than a year later, YouTube was bought by Google, the past masters at knowing how the internet works- for $1.65 billion. Given that people estimate that Sequoia’s comparatively meagre investment in the company netted them a 30% share in the company by April 2006, this suggests the company’s value increased over 40 times in six months. That ballsy investment has proved a very, very profitable one, but some would argue that even this massive (and very quickly made) whack of cash hasn’t proved worth it in the long run. After all, less than two years after he was offered $500 000 for Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg’s company was worth several billion and still rising (it’s currently valued at $11 billion, after that messy stock market flotation), and YouTube is now, if anything, even bigger.

It’s actually quite hard to visualise just how big a thing YouTube has now managed to be come, but I’ll try; every second, roughly one hour of footage is uploaded to the site, or to put it another way, you would have to watch continually for the next three and a half millennia just to get through the stuff published this year. Even watching just the ones involving cats would be a full-time job. I occasionally visit one channel with more than one and a half thousand videos published by just one guy, each of which is around 20 minutes long, and there are in the region of several thousand people across the world who are able to make a living through nothing more than sitting in front of a camera and showing their antics to the world.

Precisely because of this, the very concept of YouTube has not infrequently come under fire. In much the same way as social networking sites, the free and open nature of YouTube means everything is on show for the whole world to see, so that video you of your mate doing this hilarious thing while drunk one time could, at best, make him the butt of a few jokes among your mates or, at worst, subject him to large-scale public ridicule. For every TomSka, beloved by his followers and able to live off YouTube-related income, there is a Star Wars kid, who (after having the titular video put online without his permission) was forced to seek psychiatric help for the bullying and ridicule he became the victim of and launched a high-profile lawsuit against his antagonists. Like so many things, YouTube is neither beneficial nor detrimental to humanity as a whole on its own; it is merely a tool of our modern world, and to what degree of awesomeness or depravity we exploit it is down purely to us.

Sorry about that, wasn’t really a conclusion was it?

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Bouncing horses

I have , over recent months, built up a rule concerning posts about YouTube videos, partly on the grounds that it’s bloody hard to make a full post out of them but also because there are most certainly a hell of a lot of good ones out there that I haven’t heard of, so any discussion of them is sure to be incomplete and biased, which I try to avoid wherever possible. Normally, this blog also rarely delves into what might be even vaguely dubbed ‘current affairs’, but since it regularly does discuss the weird and wonderful world of the internet and its occasional forays into the real world I thought that I might make an exception; today, I’m going to be talking about Gangnam Style.

Now officially the most liked video in the long and multi-faceted history of YouTube (taking over from the previous record holder and a personal favourite, LMFAO’s Party Rock Anthem), this music video by Korean rapper & pop star PSY was released over two and a half months ago, and for the majority of that time it lay in some obscure and foreign corner of the internet. Then, in that strange way that random videos, memes and general random bits and pieces are wont to do online, it suddenly shot to prominence thanks to the web collectively pissing itself over the sight of a chubby Korean bloke in sunglasses doing ‘the horse riding dance’. Quite how this was even discovered by some casual YouTube-surfer is something of a mystery to me given that said dance doesn’t even start for a good minute and a half or so, but the fact remains that it was, and that it is now absolutely bloody everywhere. Only the other day it became the first ever Korean single to reach no.1 in the UK charts, despite not having been translated from its original language, and has even prompted a dance off between rival Thai gangs prior to a gunfight. Seriously.

Not that it has met with universal appeal though. I’m honestly surprised that more critics didn’t get up in their artistic arms at the sheer ridiculousness of it, and the apparent lack of reason for it to enjoy the degree of success that it has (although quite a few probably got that out of their system after Call Me Maybe), but several did nonetheless. Some have called it ‘generic’ in music terms, others have found its general ridiculousness more tiresome and annoying than fun, and one Australian journalist commented that the song “makes you wonder if you have accidentally taken someone else’s medication”. That such criticism has been fairly limited can be partly attributed to the fact that the song itself is actually intended to be a parody anyway. Gangnam is a classy, fashionable district of the South Korean capital Seoul (PSY has likened it to Beverly Hills in California), and gangnam style is a Korean phrase referring to the kind of lavish & upmarket (if slightly pretentious) lifestyle of those who live there; or, more specifically, the kind of posers & hipsters who claim to affect ‘the Gangnam Style’. The song’s self-parody comes from the contrast between PSY’s lyrics, written from the first-person perspective of such a poser, and his deliberately ridiculous dress and dance style.

Such an act of deliberate self-parody has certainly helped to win plaudits from serious music critics, who have found themselves to be surprisingly good-humoured once told that the ridiculousness is deliberate and therefore actually funny- however, it’s almost certainly not the reason for the video’s over 300 million YouTube views, most of which surely go to people who’ve never heard of Gangnam, and certainly have no idea of the people PSY is mocking. In fact, there have been several different theories proposed as to why its popularity has soared quite so violently.

Most point to PSY’s very internet-friendly position on his video’s copyright. The Guardian claim that PSY has in fact waived his copyright to the video, but what is certain is that he has neglected to take any legal action on the dozens of parodies and alternate versions of his video, allowing others to spread the word in their own, unique ways and giving it enormous potential to spread, and spread far. These parodies have been many and varied in content, author and style, ranging from the North Korean government’s version aimed at satirising the South Korean president Park Guen-hye (breaking their own world record for most ridiculous entry into a political pissing contest, especially given that it mocks her supposed devotion to an autocratic system of government, and one moreover that ended over 30 years ago), to the apparently borderline racist “Jewish Style” (neither of which I have watched, so cannot comment on). One parody has even sparked a quite significant legal case, with 14 California lifeguards being fired for filming, dancing in, or even appearing in the background of, their parody video “Lifeguard Style” and investigation has since been launched by the City Council in response to the thousands of complaints and suggestions, one even by PSY himself, that the local government were taking themselves somewhat too seriously.

However, by far the most plausible reason for he mammoth success of the video is also the simplest; that people simply find it funny as hell. Yes, it helps a lot that such a joke was entirely intended (let’s be honest, he probably couldn’t have come up with quite such inspired lunacy by accident), and yes it helps how easily it has been able to spread, but to be honest the internet is almost always able to overcome such petty restrictions when it finds something it likes. Sometimes, giggling ridiculousness is just plain funny, and sometimes I can’t come up with a proper conclusion to these posts.

P.S. I forgot to mention it at the time, but last post was my 100th ever published on this little bloggy corner of the internet. Weird to think it’s been going for over 9 months already. And to anyone who’s ever stumbled across it, thank you; for making me feel a little less alone.