In its early days, the odds seemed good that YouTube was destined for failure. After a false start as a dating website, it wasn't clear whether the company could cover the cost of streaming video content, or avoid the fate of Napster, which was sued out of business for copyright infringement.
Hey! You want to get noticed on YouTube. It's tough. Videos are uploaded every minute. You must have high-quality video. That's why you need a smart, quick workflow. This is not optional. It's your channel's foundation. Your best partner? A great YouTube video editor. This tool is your magic. It takes raw footage and builds a great, polished story. This hooks your viewers.
That appears to be what's going on today. Earlier this morning, a spike on DownDetector made it seem as though YouTube was experiencing a partial outage, but users quickly found out that ad blockers were to blame. Affected users saw a mostly blank webpage when trying to load up YouTube, as pictured below. As would be the case with any outage, some users tried to access YouTube via other browsers and found that the platform started working again. The difference? Ad blockers.
There's hardly ever such a thing as truly free money. We pay for everything, in some way: with labor, with time, with suffering. So getting a payment from a tech or social media settlement isn't exactly free - it's likely the company messed up in some way and it legitimately owes you that cash - but it certainly can feel like getting free money. And if you're already using the tech or platform, then you might as well get paid for the issue.
Originally announced back in July, YouTube's live leaderboards list the most engaged viewers within a broadcast, ranked by "XP," which is a cumulative score based on how many comments, Super Chat, Super Stickers, and/or gifts that each viewer has submitted during a stream. One of the main pieces of feedback we heard from creators is that you would like to be able to opt out of the leaderboard experience, either before or during a live stream. We're happy to share that this is now possible.
YouTube continues to be a dominant force in advertising and entertainment, but the disruption from generative artificial intelligence spares no company. In a memo to staff Wednesday, YouTube CEO Neal Mohan cited the disruption and opportunity of AI as a reason to restructure the video platform, with the executive creating a new reporting structure for the company's product teams, and rolling out a voluntary employee buyout program, offering severance to any YouTubers that may want to leave the company.
Kids watch a lot of YouTube. Google's keenly aware of that: It offers a version of the YouTube app that's explicitly made for children's content in YouTube Kids, and earlier this year, rolled out a controversial AI-based age estimation system to automatically flag accounts that may be used by minors. These measures are meant in part to help Google avoid legal trouble - like a 2019 class-action suit filed in California accusing Google and YouTube of violating privacy laws by collecting information about minors
Daniel Naroditsky was raised in San Mateo County -- started as a child prodigy and quickly became one of the most influential voices in the chess world. "It's really a tragedy for the whole chess community," said Alex Robins, Chess Director at the Mechanics' Institute. People in the Bay Area chess community are heartbroken following the unexpected death of Daniel Naroditsky. "It's a huge loss. He played here as recently as about a year ago," said Robins.
I'm very conscious of the fact that ABC pays for the show, and YouTube pays nothing - and YouTube gets to sell it and keep half the money. That's quite a deal for them,
According to YouTube posts, the celebrity tributes were plentiful. They came from Ed Sheeran, Eminem, Taylor Swift, Celine Dion, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Post Malone, Dax, Lil Wayne, Jelly Roll, Selena Gomez, Justin Bieber and Imagine Dragons. But none of them were real. They were all generated using artificial intelligence. And they often featured fake thumbnail images that showed the artists in tears or with mournful expressions.
Top YouTube creator MrBeast is worried about AI's impact on creators' livelihoods, despite having dabbled with using the technology himself. On Monday, the creator posted his concerns on social media, where he openly wondered how AI-generated videos could affect the "millions of creators currently making content for a living." "Scary times," he added. MrBeast, whose real name is Jimmy Donaldson, is No.
Anika Nilles has been announced as RUSH's drummer for their upcoming reunion tour, which will mark the band's first shows in 11 years, and first concerts since the passing of the legendary Neil Peart in 2020. Rather than tap a well-known name to fill Peart's shoes, RUSH opted for a relative unknown in Nilles, a 42-year-old German virtuoso who comes from a family of drummers.
YouTube is expanding its live-stream Gift Goals to all creators in the U.S., while it's also got some improvements to its auto-dubbing option, which will make your alternative language variations more appealing. which enables creators to incentivize donations during a live-stream, by offering a reward at a certain donation threshold. announced that it was testing this with selected live-stream creators last month, and now, it's making live-stream gift goals available to all eligible creators in the U.S. Gift goals can help you build your community by encouraging your viewers to work towards a common mission. Once you reach your goal, you can celebrate with your community in a variety of creative ways."
In part two of How YouTube Ate TV, Fast Company 's oral history of YouTube, we look at how the company's rapid ascent after its 2005 founding led to multiple challenges, from bandwidth costs to unhappy copyright holders. This prompted the startup to consider selling itself, and on October 9, 2006, Google announced that it would be buying it, for $1.65 billion. That deal came with the promise that the web giant would help YouTube scale up even further without micromanaging it. Eventually, the balance they struck between integration and independence paid off. But when YouTube was still a tiny, plucky startup, nobody was looking that far ahead.
YouTube is the most powerful platform in entertainment, and as such it has outsize influence on what kind of entertainment people make and watch. When YouTube adds a mid-video ad break, videos get longer to accommodate it. When YouTube tells podcasters to make video, podcasters make video. And for its next act, it appears the company is prepared to turn all its creators into livestreamers.
