Everybody's Watching
As the 13th most popular site on the Internet, with people watching more than 100 million of its videos everyday, YouTube is taking the web by storm.
By Jack Boulware. Photograph by Darren Braun.
On an evening in late April of this year, a Kowloon Motor Bus was going along route 68X toward Hong Kong’s Yuen Long District. Property agent Elvis Ho Yui Hei shifted in his seat. He was trapped in a situation familiar to all of us, sitting one row behind an older man talking very loudly on a cell phone. The 23-year-old tapped the gentleman on the shoulder, addressed him with the respectful term “Uncle,” and asked him to please speak more softly. And that’s how it all began.
The older man suddenly leaned over his seat and shouted at Ho, unleashing a stream of verbal abuse, both harrowing and hilarious. For six long minutes, the quarrel continued, Ho mostly silent as the older man ranted on, demanding an apology, explaining how his life is very stressful, and spewing profanities about Ho’s mother.
We’ve all been privy to a moment like this at one time or another — a rare window of real life that you might see and tell your friends about afterward; another little anecdote from the daily pageant of human beings trying to share space on the planet. However, this particular moment was recorded on video by a resourceful accountant/student named Jon Fong Wing Hang, who, sitting across the aisle from Ho, happened to have a cell-phone camera.
The video segment was then uploaded to a Hong Kong Internet forum and quickly reposted to YouTube, an online repository of digital videos that’s based in California. Within a month, the segment, known as “Bus Uncle,” became one of YouTube’s most popular clips: a slice of real life on a bus, seen and enjoyed by millions of viewers.
Helpful fans translated the argument from Cantonese and provided Chinese and English subtitles. Catchphrases such as “I have pressure. You have pressure. Why did you provoke me?” circulated throughout Hong Kong culture and were even printed on T-shirts. News agencies around the world ran stories about “Bus Uncle” and sent reporters to try and identify the man. Cultural commentators debated whether the video clip represented the emotional state of Hong Kong citizens and the pressures of living in such a densely populated society.
As of this writing, nearly four million people worldwide have watched the “Bus Uncle” video on YouTube. What began as a simple, weird altercation on a Hong Kong bus has turned into a worldwide phenomenon. And all because of a small company in an office above a pizza parlor in San Mateo, California.
Conceived at a San Francisco dinner party in early 2005 by former PayPal employees Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, YouTube was supposed to be a website that allowed people to post videos and share them with anyone. Some of the first videos ever posted were of Chen and his cat, PJ.
A beta version of the site debuted in May 2005, and the official site launched in December. Investors quickly seized the opportunity, and now, $11.5 million later, YouTube hums with nearly 60 employees. Each day, more than 60,000 new videos are added.
According to the information-services company Alexa, YouTube is the 13th most popular site on the Internet. In July 2006, 30 million people visited YouTube.
Placing a video on the site is easy. A user signs up for a membership and submits a clip, which is approved by YouTube staff and then added to the site. Viewers rate the clip, and software keeps track of the total viewings and rankings by day, month, and of all time. Clip length is limited to 10 minutes, but YouTube has recently added a Director program — designed for filmmakers, comedians, and professional content producers — that doesn’t impose a time limit.
So what’s there to watch? If you haven’t checked it out yet, be prepared for the strangest, most obscure, clandestine, nostalgic, trendy, and pointless video clips ever recorded by the human race. In addition to the classic “Bus Uncle,” you can find European music videos, Japanese anime, political news clips, soccer highlights, pet tricks, low-budget film parodies, amateur musicians, vacation videos, and an inordinate number of teenagers staring into a web camera and lip-synching a popular song. Adult-oriented clips are edited out; everything else is fair game. Links to these videos are spread via e-mail or are posted on blogs or other websites.
Media critics have attributed the YouTube phenomenon in part to our shortening attention span and to our access to technology, as well as to an increase in exhibitionism in our society. But it poses a problem for old-school media accustomed to spending money to produce videos and then recouping the investment by selling the content to viewers. Unlike cable or satellite television, YouTube is totally free.
In December 2005, a user posted a short Saturday Night Live film to the site. The rap parody was titled “Lazy Sunday” and depicted the very nongangster lives of two slackers eating cupcakes and going to see the movie The Chronicles of Narnia. Traditional film and television studios were stunned to see their copyrighted work passed around the world, much farther than the reach of Saturday Night Live itself. In one sense, it made the show relevant again to a younger audience. Unfortunately, all this exposure came without permission or payment.
Even though money couldn’t buy such successful viral advertising, NBC issued a cease-and-desist order and demanded that all its clips be removed from YouTube. Another division of the corporation, the programming executives, wanted to know how they could get involved. NBC has since struck a partnership with YouTube to air the network’s clips and previews on the website.
Visiting YouTube for a test-drive yields an unimaginable wealth of — well, I don’t really know what you’d call it. A lot of video clips. I even conducted a test of random, obscure searches, just to see what was in the archive. If you want to stump the system, you’ll have to try harder than I did.
A search for Homer Simpson’s favorite ’70s rock band, “Bachman-Turner Overdrive,” brings up 13 videos. (Were there even 13 videos made of the band?) There are 94 clips for “Donald Rumsfeld.” “The Brady Bunch theme song” — 15 clips. The 1960s Brazilian Tropicália group “Os Mutantes” brings up 60. Taking a cue from YouTube cofounder Chen, I search for “cat tricks” and come up with 374. How about something nonsensical, like “monkey peanut butter”? Voilà, two very-good-quality clips of monkeys eating peanut butter. And just for fun, searching for “NBC,” one of YouTube’s newest financial backers, yields 2,588 videos.
Yet for all the excitement, it’s important to remember that online video is still a nascent media form. Picture quality is often grainy and not appropriate for a big-screen monitor. There’s also the issue of profitability. YouTube has begun to run advertising on the site, but it will be a while before it generates enough revenue to be self-supporting.
And there’s the problem of being the first. Online communities like Friendster and Napster captured our imagination not so long ago, but users have moved on. Although the equivalent of roughly a tenth of the U.S. population visits YouTube each month, competitors are already popping up. Internet giants Yahoo! and Google are offering free videos, as are a handful of start-ups like Revver, which offers cash to clip contributors. As for how long YouTube will maintain the dominant market share, no one knows.
Which makes it all the more important to visit YouTube in its raw, untamed state — before its video selection is diluted by advertisers and sponsors. Actually, there’s also one, no, make that three other reasons you should visit the site now; you might call them the YouTube superstars. Like most people who submit personal videos, these contributors do it for the exposure and the attention, definitely not for the money.
Until May 2006, 20-year-old Brooke Allison Brodack, a.k.a. “Brookers,” was working as a hostess at the 99 Restaurant in Holden, Massachusetts. After hours, she made quirky videos in her bedroom and posted them on YouTube. Response was so enormous, she kept making more clips, most of them featuring her dancing to songs, making funny faces, or talking about her life. People began to post other clips inspired by Brookers. There’s even a fan website devoted to her, www.brookerfanatics.com.
And then Carson Daly Productions called. The talk-show host was a huge admirer of Brodack’s clips and sensed a market — outside of YouTube viewers — for her quirky creativity. She ended up signing an 18-month development deal, and then retired from the restaurant business.
Another popular contributor is Smosh, a T-shirt company in Carmichael, California, run by Anthony Padilla, 19, and Ian Hecox, 18. The two young men posted a cheap video they made of each other lip-synching and play-fighting to audio from the Mortal Kombat game-and-film franchise. It’s completely stupid, but millions of viewers watched it anyway, and the Smosh boys quickly posted another clip of similar nonsense, set to the tune of the Pokémon theme song.
I don’t understand the appeal of Smosh videos, and you may not, either, but clearly we just don’t get it, because in 11 months, more than 21 million people have watched these two clips. The Pokémon video is the second-most-watched YouTube video ever.
But the number-one video in YouTube history, the Mount Olympus of homemade clips, is an unedited six-minute segment of a dancing man from the Midwest. Yes, that’s right, dancing. Inspirational comedian Judson Laipply often appears at schools and organizations, and as part of his skit, he does a choreographed dance routine to popular songs by Elvis Presley, the Bee Gees, AC/DC, Eminem, and many others. This clip of a live performance, titled “Evolution of Dance,” is consistently YouTube’s most-viewed video, and since its posting on April 6, nearly 33 million people have watched it.
Laipply was besieged by media from around the United States. Despite the attention, he has never posted any other clips. But he does say on his website, www.lifeis
change.com, that he’s working on a sequel.
Wondering what became of “Bus Uncle”? The clip itself has spawned numerous versions and parodies. We can now hear the ranting bus passenger’s voice mixed with songs by Dr. Dre, Lindsay Lohan, and Hong Kong singer Sammi Cheng. Plus, there are a ton of real-life reenactments, animation spoofs, and the like. There are actually many more YouTube videos about “Bus Uncle” than of the clip itself. And if you haven’t seen the original, you’re totally lost.
After a month of highly important investigative work in an attempt to unravel the mystery, reporters from a Hong Kong magazine finally tracked down the Bus Uncle, who is named Chan Yuet-tung. The 51-year-old lives by himself in an apartment with five cats, and until his YouTube appearance, his biggest claim to fame was having run in three elections for chief executive of Hong Kong (he didn’t win, obviously). He doesn’t listen to radio or watch TV, and he had no idea that he was such a superstar.
The media in Hong Kong chewed on the “Bus Uncle” story for days. Chan appeared jovial on camera and laughed off the incident, saying he doesn’t use foul language at all. In the wake of his brief fame, a restaurant hired him to do public relations. But not all citizens considered him a hero. Three men mugged him at work one day, and he ended up in the emergency room.
The tale of Chan and his “Bus Uncle” triumph has now subsided. The videos are still all over YouTube, but the news cycle has passed. Yet in Hong Kong, the legend continues: A current advertisement for a bottled-water company features a reenactment of the “Bus Uncle” incident — the most-watched episode in bus-transit history.