CHAPTER TWO
YouTube and the Media

This chapter is focused on YouTube’s evolving relationship with the surrounding media environment – a relationship that has several distinctive but interlocking aspects. We begin the chapter with a discussion of how early YouTube was framed by the ‘traditional’ or ‘mainstream’ media, who reported on and constructed meanings for what was then a new and exotic cultural phenomenon. The next section of the chapter focuses specifically on the discourses of youth and ‘media panic’ that were significant in this early reporting. Later sections focus on how talent and cultural practices flowed back and forth between YouTube’s vernacular culture and traditional broadcast media systems; then, how copyright has been a site of struggle between YouTube and traditional media industries as well as between YouTube and YouTubers. Finally, we discuss how YouTube became increasingly entangled and co-dependent on the formalised media industries before becoming a powerful, mainstream media platform in its own right – along the way participating in the transformation of the media business itself.

Framing YouTube

By 2007, YouTube had already disrupted existing media business models and had emerged as a new site of media power. It had received significant press attention, and was now a mainstream player in the digital media industry, but it was also regularly used as a vehicle for rehearsing public debates about new media and the Internet as a disruptive force on business and society, particularly with regard to young people. In this section, we revisit some of the ideas that underpinned these early media representations of the platform, and consider YouTube’s evolving position in the changing digital media environment.

In engaging with these debates, we draw on our thematic analysis (completed in 2007) of how the press and television news media covered YouTube in its first two years of existence. What emerged is a set of issues that lined up with traditional news values, and that worked to shore up the interests of the incumbent media. The then-novel platform tended to be framed either as a chaotic and unregulated repository for a flood of amateur content, or (in Business sections particularly) as a big new player in the digital economy. These definitional frames resulted in a steady but repetitive stream of news stories clustering around some familiar themes: youth, celebrity, and morality on the one hand; copyright law and the media or technology business on the other.

These debates, however familiar, contributed to forming and bedding down the public’s understanding of what YouTube was and what mattered about it. Media framing and reality create each other, forming a dynamic feedback loop, so that the mainstream or incumbent media’s early struggles to comprehend and make sense of the meanings and implications of YouTube not only reflected public concerns, but also helped to produce them. The repetitive framing of YouTube as an amateur ‘free-for-all’, for instance, shaped the agenda around concerns with lawlessness, the crisis of expertise, and the collapse of cultural value. As YouTube has built an increasingly sophisticated advertising platform and courted professional producers and large entertainment companies, the company has worked somewhat concertedly to shift this framing in all its public messaging, while retaining the vernacular flavour that has made it distinctive.

Similarly, mainstream media discourses about YouTube helped to frame the problems that later became matters of material concern for policy and law, and consequently shaped the changing affordances and protocols of the platform itself. So, for example, concerns about copyright ‘piracy’, antisocial behaviour or exploitation of vulnerable young people mean that regulatory interventions are required – like blocking YouTube on school computers to protect children and young people from cyberbullying, premature sexualisation, or exposure to commercialism.

One of the most striking things about early mainstream reporting of YouTube is the degree to which these news frames conflicted with one another. For example, on New Year’s Eve 2007, Australian current affairs programs Today Tonight and A Current Affair both broadcast stories about the most popular YouTube clips of the preceding year, describing the website as both a repository for ‘amazing, embarrassing, and sometimes downright dangerous moments’ around the world, and a launching platform for ‘many new stars’ (‘YouTube’s Most Watched’, 2007; ‘Best YouTube Videos’, 2007). At such times YouTube was framed positively, and was represented as a site of wacky, weird, and wonderful user-generated content, some of which might go viral, and lead to the discovery of talented new stars. Within only a few weeks, however, the same programs returned to business-as-usual stories about YouTube, framing it as a very bad object indeed – an under-regulated site of lawless, unethical, and even pathological behaviour centred around youth, categorised as both a vulnerable group and a source of trouble.

As YouTube has evolved, so too has its role in the cycles of news reporting: from being described as one among a plethora of novel ‘Web 2.0’ applications and a potential site of ordinary self-expression, to its prominence as a threat to media dominance and civil order, and, more recently, as a major media company in its own right. By 2017, broadcast media were continuing to celebrate YouTube with regular birthday specials and retrospectives – often run as ‘human interest’ stories in television news and current affairs programs, which also help to memorialise it, and to reinforce a narrative of progress from primitive and amateur to slick and professional, from trivial and niche to mass popular.

Social Anxieties and Media Panics

In the popular imagination, YouTube has always been connected to persistent social anxieties, particularly about young people and digital media. The narrative tropes that go along with these anxieties are characterised by the particularly modern convergence of ‘trouble-as-fun, fun-as-trouble’ that Hebdige (1988: 30) saw in media images of youth in postwar Britain – where young people were represented as an exotic other, at once exuberantly creative and dangerous. Images of youth have long been closely associated with ideas about shifts in capitalism and the organisation of social structures such as class, wealth distribution, and consumption practices (Murdock and McCron, 1976: 10), and where new media are seen as key disruptive agents, the two are often conflated. Indeed, Kirsten Drotner (2000: 150) argues that young people are connected to media by complementary metaphors of newness and change, and because of this, discourses around youth and discourses around new media inevitably become entangled. In the case of YouTube the ‘trouble-as-fun, fun-as-trouble’ convergence is further amplified through adult anxieties about an ‘intergenerational [digital] divide’ mobilised through discourses of ‘technological exoticism’ (Herring, 2008), where both YouTube and the masses of ‘youth’ assumed to be its default users, are undisciplined, savage, and at the same time new and exciting (Driscoll and Gregg, 2008). This is apparent even in seemingly positive arguments about young people’s ‘natural’ technological prowess, such as Prensky’s (2001a; 2001b) frustratingly persistent notion of the ‘digital native’, which still underpins so much talk of media ‘generations’ (Burgess, 2016).

While much of this anxiety centred around adolescents early on, in recent years, heightened concerns around risk and safety for younger children have emerged as YouTube has become more mundane and embedded in everyday life, and as it has become available on mobile screens. YouTube is formally restricted to people thirteen years and older, but is hugely popular with kids far younger than that, whether watching with their parents and peers or on their own. One solution to this has been the YouTube Kids app, a mobile-only, advertising-supported version of the YouTube platform for children three to five years old that was launched in February 2015,1 with embedded parental controls (such as a timer, and ability to toggle search on or off), populated with pre-curated content (Shribman 2015; Kleeman, 2015). But whether inside or outside the walled garden, the huge popularity of toy unboxing videos with young kids and the rise of social media influencer channels aimed at or featuring young children raise regulatory concerns in markets that have controls aimed at restricting advertising to children (Campbell, 2016; Craig and Cunningham, 2017). There are also persistent adult anxieties about children inadvertently being exposed to inappropriate content, not only through the platform’s regular recommended videos or search algorithms, but even through the YouTube Kids app (see, for example, Laura June’s (2017) exposé of the ‘Fake Peppa Pig problem’).

Many of the earliest news stories about YouTube followed the pattern of the ‘moral panic’ – a term which has now passed into everyday language but which in cultural studies is used to describe a specific cycle of co-influence between media representation and social reality around issues of public concern (Cohen,...