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.
. 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.