Twenty years ago the first YouTube video, the cradle of the creator economy

On 23 April 2005, the first historical film of one of the digital world's most popular platforms was uploaded online: officially born just over two months earlier in an office in San Mateo, California, with the registration of the domain youtube.com, the creature of Jawed Karim (the protagonist of the first 19-second video broadcast from the San Diego zoo), Steve Chen and Chad Hurley - three former employees of PayPal - had in fact already changed its nature. The initial intention of the three, in fact, was to set up a dating platform, called 'Tune in, Hook up', through which users would upload short presentation videos. YouTube thus took shape as a hosting and video-sharing service on the ashes of the failure of the original project, immediately establishing itself as the place on the Net where to publish and view videos of any kind. The app phenomenon was still to come, but it spread very quickly: the threshold of 30,000 daily users connected to the site was reached in just one month and only six million were needed to reach two million. Within a year of its launch, the platform was registering 25 million views and uploading 20,000 videos per day. Then, in the autumn of 2006, came the move by Google, which bought Karim, Chen and Hurley's creature for 1.65 billion dollars, changing the history of the Web and the lives of millions of people forever.

In 20 years, YouTube has continued to evolve, gradually introducing new features and services such as live streaming, short films (Shorts) and opening up the service to paid subscription with premium subscriptions that eliminate commercials and offer extra features such as background playback. Today, several experts describe it as a fundamental tool for entertainment, education, information and marketing and this definition finds substance in the platform's current numbers. In fact, it is estimated that YouTube now has over 2.7 billion monthly active users, with about 122 million people accessing it every day; over 500 hours of films are uploaded per minute (for about 2.6 million videos) while daily views of Shorts now touch 70 billion and more than a billion hours of content are played by Internet users all over the planet in the course of a single day. According to data from the specialised portal eMarketer, as of last September, the average time spent online on the platform was 36 minutes per day, of which 17 were via TV, 15 via smartphone and the remaining 4 via PC. Its popularity among youngsters is also record-breaking: according to Ofcom, the authority for communication companies in the UK, more than 80% of children and young people between 3 and 17 years of age use it regularly. As for advertising revenue, in the United States alone, there is talk of close to 30 billion dollars annually. Numbers that elect YouTube into the elite of digital services, rivalling Facebook in terms of monthly active users, TikTok for dominance in the field of apps on which more time is spent via smartphone, and Spotify in terms of sites to listen to music.

The secret of these numbers? For many insiders it answers to a very specific prerogative, its multifunctionality. YouTube is in fact the only platform that mixes social media, streaming video and music jukeboxes and podcasts, competing with the illustrious specialists in these fields and almost always coming out the winner in these comparisons, regardless of the medium used by users (television, mobile phone or computer) and the content published (ranging from viral videos to documentaries). And on the subject of content, YouTube is different from other platforms because it has never made a field choice between 'user generated content' and professional contributions, remaining free of constraints, harmonising the various formats organically and, above all, succeeding in the feat of conquering the small screen (that of TV), which has always been the medium par excellence for entertainment and information. If someone called YouTube the 'perfect platform', in short, there are probably few reasons to disagree.

Everyone can agree on what YouTube is: a place to find everything from music clips to sports films, from forgotten TV programmes to the endless gallery of reviews, tutorials and self-produced videos of all kinds. In 20 years, the platform has become an immense archive of digital society, and its longevity (in 2005 MySpace, the first real social network on the Net, was still in vogue, while Instagram and Spotify did not yet exist) is inextricably linked to the success it has brought to several generations of creators. Youtubers and vloggers, and to some extent the influencers themselves, are professions that were born with this platform, taking advantage of the possibility of having a direct relationship with the viewer/user, giving rise to a new market (which later exploded with social networks) that today is worth billions and billions of dollars (250 according to the latest Goldman Sachs surveys) and that rewards the stars of this universe with earnings that reach tens of millions per year. YouTube as the cradle of the creator economy? It is difficult to find elements to think otherwise, not least because the evolution that the platform has undergone makes it still today a perfect tool for the smart home, taking on the role of the most popular service on the smart TVs of millions and millions of digital consumers.

YouTube's new life began some time ago, when it went from being a virtual marketplace for amateur video contributions to becoming a showcase for professional producers and creators, for companies and newspapers, for universities and cultural associations. But to the question many are asking about YouTube's near future, what is the right answer? The one given last September by the company's CEO, Neal Mohan, rests on two cornerstones: the centrality of creators and the innovation in creativity brought in by artificial intelligence. The former remain the beating heart of the platform, and like 'new start-ups' they will need to be supported with tools to build sustainable businesses, diversify revenue sources (subscriptions, merchandise, brand partnerships and others) and reach a global audience. Mohan's goal, in a nutshell, is to make YouTube the ideal place to create and earn money, and Generative AI (by Deep Mind and Google, of course) plays a key role in this, allowing creators to expand their content offerings, including background videos, soundtracks, and multilingual dubbing and subtitling tools. Of course, as the CEO of YouTube says, Gen AI needs stakes to protect creators and manage their rights (while machine learning will be used to estimate the age of users and consequently provide more appropriate experiences) but the road is marked out. The future of YouTube, in short, is that of an ever-evolving dynamic platform, which will be a place to broadcast live global events and at the same time a multi-screen and multi-device interactive entertainment experience (with the introduction of the second screen to post comments and complete purchases while watching TV) that will embrace (this is Mohan's promise) artificial intelligence in a safe way.