By Steven Witkin ’16

Think back to YouTube, circa 2008. You probably used the growing video-sharing website to stream pre-VEVO pirated music videos, watch viral dance routines gone bad or learn how to be a ninja. Long before anybody called anyone a youtuber or content creator, when there were no ads before videos, YouTube was just another social media site, a platform for normal people to share their creations with a normal audience.

Now 10 years old, YouTube has retained its intimate personality. However, the people talking through the screens have turned into celebrities. Once YouTube started paying ad-supported content creators by the view in 2008, the most popular vloggers could call themselves professional youtubers. These self-produced entertainers, many with millions of subscribers, are now able to devote their full time to content production. This puts them on the level of traditional celebrities, except that they have full control over their videos. In several cases, a homemade comedy idea has turned into a franchise. For example, Hannah Hart’s 2011 “My Drunk Kitchen” skit, in which she cooked “grilled cheese” while smashed, grew into a weekly web series with 2.2 million subscribers and a published cookbook.

In this way, YouTube has risen to the level of television with its highly viewed weekly series. Some series even have turned into television shows. “Broad City”, a YouTube series made by two friends from 2009-2011, was picked up by Comedy Central and debuted as a sitcom in 2014.

Other youtubers have become more popular than television. The most viewed show on television is The Big Bang Theory with 21.3 million viewers. Swedish gamer Felix Kjellberg, a.k.a PewDiePie, outdoes all of television with 39.5 million subscribers. His vulgar reactions to video games, nonexistent outside of the internet, have a combined 10 billion views and earn him $7 million a year. YouTube still lacks the professional resources that television shows have, but it wins in convenience. A poll showed that young adults get an overwhelming percent of their video content from mobile devices. The problem with television is that it is grounded, while YouTube can be accessed anywhere.

YouTube is also important to the democratic process. Not only does it act as a vehicle for political ideas and discussions, it has become a center for free education. Thousands of free videos from Khan Academy, Crash Course, and MIT OpenCourseWare are available to teach college-level subjects to anybody. In this way, YouTube may revolutionized how people receive their news and education.

As YouTube develops, a duality is forming. The upper crust of celebrities is appearing, but the masses still use the platform for their personal creations. As it seems now, YouTube is part of a larger movement to move away from traditional television and form a society where anyone, anywhere can be entertained for free.