A hard sell to the executives

It may be hard to imagine now, but Live was bigger than anything YouTube had ever attempted, and it was their first production with truly global ambitions. “There was a lot of ambivalence internally at the time about a big TV-like production,” says Mia Quagliarello, who, as YouTube’s then-community manager, helped select many of the participants. The producer of MTV’s Music Video Awards from 2001 to 2005, Frattini was no stranger to spectacle — Madonna and Britney Spears’ infamous kiss fell under her purview. And as the first woman to run a Super Bowl halftime show, she’s something of a trailblazer in the field of high-production pageantry. She knows how to arrange big, shiny pieces in ways people haven’t seen before — at least on the internet.

In 2008, YouTube’s newly appointed, first-ever director of marketing, Chris Di Cesare, approached his new employers with a pitch for something similar in tone to what he’d done with his previous company, Microsoft. His New York launch for the mega-game Halo 3 featured shot glasses sampling Mountain Dew, T-shirt and bouncy ball giveaways, a trio of all-terrain vehicles popping tricks on a closed-off Fifth Avenue, and performances by Ludacris and Bobby Valentino, the duo behind “Pimpin’ All Over the World.” (Di Cesare declined to be interviewed for this piece, as did Google at large.)

The show may have opened with Katy Perry and closed with Akon crowdsurfing to “Right Now (Na Na Na),” but Frattini points instead to the pairing of instrumental guitar virtuoso Joe Satriani with South Korean Lim Jeong-hyun — better known on YouTube as funtwo — as an example of what it was all about. At the time, funtwo had a New York Times profile under his belt — and, maybe more importantly, millions of views.

“There’s always a joy in getting big celebrities together, but something like that was unique,” Frattini says. That performance is one of the few still available online in its totality. Its highlight is funtwo’s dumbstruck joy to be on stage with this hideous monstrosity of a guitar, playing with one of his heroes. Lim Jeong-hyun can’t stop smiling.

In 2008, YouTube was hardly the all-seeing panopticon is it today. “It was still the new kid on the block, with a dominant MySpace and surging Facebook,” remembers Tay Zonday, whose 2007 “Chocolate Rain” video threw him into the spotlight (released in 2007, it currently has over 92 million views). The site was hitting its first real stride: in June of 2008, Forbes projected YouTube’s first-ever revenue profit, somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 million that year. But there was still the matter of dedication — the average YouTube viewer spent 15 minutes on the site, compared to the four hours a day the average American spent watching television.

The inmates running the asylum

The chosen tactic, it seems, was to let the inmates run the shiniest asylum the warden could afford. Aaron Yonda, co-creator of “Chad Vader,” a Star Wars parody web series, says that though Google suggested that his team work with the “Will it Blend?” guy, it didn’t “get involved in the creative process.” When Zonday suggested he have his own announcers’ booth at YouTube Live to act as a “voice of God,” Google built it for him. And Queen Rania of Jordan was on hand to accept the inaugural YouTube Visionary Award for her work fighting Arab stereotypes — it was the only award handed out all night. “It was the first time a lot of us were meeting,” says Michael Buckley, of the “What the Buck?” video series. “We were just all so excited!”

It was a tactic that made sense for YouTube: community strength was key to the video site’s hypothetical success. This wasn’t the first time Google had reached out to its stars. Since the company had purchased YouTube in 2006, it’d been holding community events. The company’s idea was to let creators know they were different than other websites, that they cared. Soon after Zonday’s “Chocolate Rain” went viral, he was invited to YouTube’s offices to attend Videocracy, a crash course on YouTube for advertisers, as well as the 2008 YouTube Awards (an event distinct from YouTube Live).

But both of these events were meant for insiders. Videocracy was intended to bring advertisers into the fold, while the Awards were aimed at those who already saw YouTube as their main source of entertainment — its press tour included both Zonday and Felicia Day. YouTube Live was for that existing community too, but it cast a wider net; its goal was to position YouTube as not just a host, not just a social experience, but as a culture unto itself.

“It was our first time live in the Vader suit,” Aaron Yonda told me over the phone. One half of “Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager” Yonda was among the first wave of genuine YouTube celebrities. Some of the earliest video makers to enter into the YouTube Partner Program, he and co-creator Matt Sloan had already been profiled in the New York Times and had an agent at William Morris. When Google came calling, they were going back and forth between Los Angeles and Madison, Wisconsin, pitching ideas to studios. For Yonda and Sloan, it seemed like the perfect chance to show “Chad” off on a global stage. Back-and-forth talks with Google made it clear that they’d have a stage appearance, which eventually did become a sketch with Tom Dickson, better known as the “Will it Blend?” guy.

00:01:11

Katy Perry kicks things off by announcing the show as “the first annual YouTube Awards.”

00:07:17

Tay Zonday and the Vlog Squad are super excited.

00:22:34

A nicely blended meal for Chad Vader.

00:23:55

Marina Orlova of Hot for Words describes the event as ‘scrumptulescent.’

00:52:30

Jamie Hyneman from ‘Mythbusters’ asks everyone if they “wanna see somebody get shot?”

00:57:51

Mike Relm bites your finger.

Katy Perry

Beardyman

Brandon Hardesty

Sick Puppies

Will it Blend

Chad Vader

William Sledd

Charlie the Unicorn

Freddie Wong

Joe Santorini and Funtwo

Smosh

Ignatius