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1. Looking at YouTube
Begun in 2004, YouTube rapidly grew as a digital video site achieving 98.8 million viewers in the United States watching 5.3 billion videos by early 2009 (Jarboe, 2009, p. xxii). Within a year of its founding, Google purchased the platform. Succeeding far beyond what and where other video sharing sites had attempted, YouTube soon held a dominant position as a Web 2.0 anchor (Jarboe, 2009, pp. 2ff). Strangelove (2010) offers a sense of YouTube's scale:
There are conflicting reports about exactly how many people watch online video, but there is a general consensus that the number is significant and growing. You Tube claims that 20 hours of video are uploaded to its servers every minutewhich suggests that 365,512 videos are uploaded every day. This is the equivalent of Hollywood releasing 114,400 new full-length movies into theaters each week. (p. 10)
Commentators in both the technology press and the popular media recognized it as something important and communication researchers soon followed.
Its very success, however, left researchers and others-even before they attempted to explore it-trying to define just what YouTube is, as well as its role in communication and its role in the wider cultures of the world. In addition, communication researchers explored how they might meaningfully comment upon it or provide some theoretical tools to foster greater understanding.
This review essay will first examine the commonly accepted history of YouTube and how people have defined it. It will then turn to studies of YouTube itself, then to studies of some of the main uses for YouTube, ending with a particularly apt research use: to employ YouTube as a source of data.
A. Defining YouTube
Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim began YouTube in 2004 as a way to post and share video material. (Though many have told their story, both Rowell, 2011, and Woog, 2009, provide a basic history and a simple explanation of how the platform works.) YouTube was not the first attempt to manage online video. One of the first, shareyourworld.com begin 1997, but failed, probably due to immature technology (Woog, 2009, pp. 9-10). In 2000 Singingfish appeared as a public site acquired by Thompson Multimedia. Further acquired by AOL in 2003, it eventually redirected users to...