YouTube launched in 2005 as a video sharing platform, and was acquired by Google (now Alphabet) in 2006. It has built an entire community of creators that run channels dedicated to topics like gaming, tech reviews, and beauty. It also houses news videos and entertainment such as music videos, movie trailers, and clips from late-night TV shows.
YouTube’s rapid growth has not been without problems. YouTubers typically make money from ads that run in front of their videos, but if they break the platform’s rules, their channels and videos can be demonetized. Executives and moderators have worked to combat harassment, misinformation, terrorist propaganda, hate content, and other abuse.
The Verge runs two YouTube channels, The Verge and Verge Science.
Podcasts started showing up for YouTube Music users in the US back in April, with YouTube promising more countries to follow. Now that process has begun.
Last week, some Canadian and Brazilian users reported they were able to access podcasts in YouTube Music, according to 9to5Google. In an email to The Verge, YouTube Music communications manager Paul Pennington confirmed the rollout to both countries.
After lingering too long in arm wrestling YouTube, so now the site’s algorithm now thinks it’s all I care about. As an unironic fan of Over the Top, a sweaty Sylvester Stallone film about a truck driver who joins an arm-wrestling tournament to win the love of his son, I’m not sure it’s wrong.
Anyway, Pan made a janky exoskeleton with an electric winch and some other junk, and it... worked?
The findings from Adalytics published last month suggested that Google broke its own rules on video ads by placing ads in small, muted video players on sites and letting them play on repeat.
Now Google claims Adalytics used faulty methodology, citing third-party data showing video ads mostly run on YouTube, as promised, and not outside sites. It also claims the report “ignores or is unaware” that even if an ad is shown on another site, that doesn’t mean the advertiser was charged for it.
Last week, Will Cogley published a video showing how he fused a vintage TV with animatronics and Alexa to create something infinitely more charming than Amazon’s Astro.
It looks so cool, but I’m not sure I want Alexa making eye contact with me as it continues with, “by the way...” For what it’s worth, Cogley says at the end he wants to change that, too:
The big change that I would like to see — you guys have probably been yelling at the screen this whole time — is that we need to dump the Alexa platform and adopt a GPT AI platform because as far as interactivity goes, it would be so much more powerful.
Last year, he did a daily vlog series and fundraiser where he started with a penny and had 30 days to travel coast-to-coast across the US (and eventually deliver a giant penny to MrBeast). He’s doing the series again this month, but this time, he has seven days to get from Paris back to the US.
So far, the series is proving to be extremely popular — Day 2 is currently the top-trending video on YouTube, and even though he just posted Day 3 a couple hours ago, it already has more than half a million views.
Bloomberg reports Spotify “has already begun talking to partners about the product” adding full-length music videos to its app. After Spotify’s podcast plan went awry, it appears the company could try to take a bite out of YouTube (which also deeply integrates videos into its YouTube Music service) and TikTok.
The app’s divisive redesign earlier this year added short video clips with videos of artists discussing music, in addition to the existing Canvas background animations.
In a new two-hour interview, MrBeast talked about how he can use his line of Feastables snacks to support his outrageous YouTube videos. (The snacks are featured prominently in his latest video about increasingly-expensive yachts, which also includes cameos from Pete Davidson and Tom Brady.)
“Even if I’m pulling a billion views a video, I don’t think anyone’s gonna pay me 10 million dollars a video, so I just gotta go make it myself,” he added.
YouTube creator MrBeast claimed in a tweet today that he was invited to join the Titan trip that disappeared on June 18th and was later determined to have imploded.
Curiously, the included screenshot of the invitation shows what appears to be a blue iMessage bubble. (Sent iMessages show as blue on the sender’s phone, not the receiver’s).
Update June 26, 8:25AM ET: He later tweeted that the screenshot was from the friend who invited him.
That’s according to a report from The Information on the value for Google of YouTube as an AI training dataset. The fact that OpenAI scraped YouTube isn’t surprising, but the company is famously secretive about its training data, partly for competition reasons, and partly, it’s thought, to stymie potential lawsuits.
YouTube’s terms of service forbid using content for anything other than “personal, non-commercial use,” but it’s an open secret in the AI industry that everyone is scraping the web constantly. If Google protests too much, it would end up incriminating itself.
[The Information]
Clark’s video on YouTube has a nice, simple overview of the phenomenon and shows how to take advantage of them on a guitar. His explanation starts at the minute mark.
Basically, when you play harmonics on a guitar, you’re isolating overtones — resonant frequencies higher than what’s called the fundamental frequency of a string.
That’s right, the first season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is free on YouTube ahead of the June 15th season two premiere — TrekMovie has links to all the episodes.
It’s got goofy episodic heart and a cool season-long arc. You can just watch it right under this post if you want:
The longtime YouTuber, science educator, and author said he’ll take a break from creating videos while being treated and asked fans to send him recommendations for movies to watch and games to play that are “really dumb things that will not make you cry.” True to form, Green still manages to go off on an educational science tangent while sharing the news.
Linus Sebastian of LinusTechTips is stepping down as CEO of Linus Media Group effective July 1st, 2023, and is handing off the reins to Terren Tong, his former boss at NCIX. Sebastian says he’s shifting to Chief Vision Officer, which he thinks sounds like a “stupid, BS-sounding, made-up role.”
From our perspective, nothing will change — Sebastian will still be in lots of videos. Maybe more, he says.
YouTube first tested the feature with March Madness, and now you’ll be able to use it while watching the NFL Draft, which begins at 8PM ET. This seems like yet another test ahead of the full NFL season, where it would make sense for YouTube to launch this feature in full.
