Steve Chen’s Mass Appeal

Portrait courtsey of Allison PR

With his power and money, 29-year-old Steve Chen is now firmly planted in that revenge-of-the-nerds hall of fame alongside Bill Gates, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin.

Chen, along with pals Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, came up with the simple idea that people might like to share videos on the Internet with their friends. In February 2005 they created YouTube, and Google snapped it up for US$1.65 billion less than a year later.

Theme talked with Chen about copyright infringement, the evolution of the infinite visual encyclopedia, and the next big thing, cell phone video.

Theme: Cofounder Jawed Karim videotaped some of the initial brainstorming sessions for YouTube, held in Chad Hurley’s garage. In one of the clips, you are clearly despondent, realizing there were only 40 videos, and not many that you’d want to watch. When did know you were onto something big?
Steve Chen: When we first launched, we joked about whether we wanted to include search in our 1.0 release. The joke was, “What’s the point of searching if there are only 50 videos on the site? You can display it all on one page!” But in retrospect, it’s easy to see [that the growth curve] was exponential from day one.

The turning point was back in November/December 2005, when we received the first round of funding from Sequoia Capital. When we were putting together the presentation, we saw that it had continued to grow. In December of 2005, we surpassed a million video views a day and I thought, “That’s it, we’ve reached the nirvana of videos.” The growth just continued to scale, and by March, we were at a hundred million video views. We all celebrated when we hit a million video views a day, but when we hit a hundred million video views, it was almost a non-event.

YouTube’s next move will be into the realm of cell phones, through a deal with Verizon. How do you think people are going to respond to watching video on a tiny screen?
Cell phones are the natural extension of what we’re doing on the Web. There’s a lot of work in building up the infrastructure to support streaming videos on mobile devices. For success, it needs to merge the technology, the infrastructure, as well as the content—a rich library of short, interesting, 30- or 45-second clips. That’s the unique thing that YouTube brings to cell phone providers; we have one of the largest libraries of user-generated content.

What is the definition of “quality” in the YouTube world? Will that get better or worse on a cell phone?
I think there are two takes on quality. One of them is the physical quality: resolution, frames per second, compression ratio. And that’s related to the infrastructure, the bandwidth that people have. Not just in their homes, but also on mobile devices. And mobile devices are going to be generations behind in terms of video codec.

And the other take is?
Growing up, there were three or five channels, and now I think there’s something like 500, 700 channels. I turn on the TV and, more often than not, I’m watching TiVo rather than something currently on air. To really reach the interests of everyone, even 500 channels is not enough. The phenomenon of YouTube is the ability to self-program and create your own channel. It’s also a community experience; it doesn’t matter where you are geographically, you can see what other people are watching and [whether or not] it’s similar to what you’re watching.

YouTube has perfected “narrowcasting,” reaching a very narrow and specific audience. What do you think is the strangest subculture on YouTube?
The beauty of our site is that it’s a forum for free expression, and YouTube offers something for everyone; I would never characterize our users as strange. One interesting thing is that we started working with the University of California, Berkley. We’re making videos of their computer science department’s technical talks accessible online. To most people, these 30- or 45-minute speeches are pretty boring, but for the people who are interested in this stuff, it’s the only place you can find it. Before YouTube, [these talks] just transpired in time, and there was no way of retrieving the content again. It’s interesting to hear students from say, India, complimenting the ability to access this content for the first time.

What makes for a super-popular YouTube video?
There is no magic formula for success, but people who put the time into understanding and engaging our community do the best. It should be a video specific to YouTube, not reformatted from other media, which may not play well. Whether you are an individual or a billion-dollar corporation, the playing field is the same.

What do you watch on YouTube?
YouChoose ’08, our new political hub, has many videos I am very excited about.

What’s the plan for dealing with copyright infringement?
YouTube really started with user-generated stuff, like Chad and me at dinner parties. If you look at the early videos, I took countless videos of my pets, Chad of his family, his kid’s birthday party, etc. Only after we saw how other people were using the site did we realize that people were uploading copyrighted content. I think people are just not aware of [the laws]. For example, people don’t realize that when they buy a CD, they don’t have the right to publish that again. You get a lot of people asking, “I bought this CD, why can’t I reproduce this?” There are takedowns, but the DMCA [Digital Millennium Copyright Act] allows counter-claims on the takedowns. The biggest challenge for us is educating the broader audience about what they can and can’t do with the content they’ve either recorded or bought.

So there is regulation. I know networks are already starting to pull content off YouTube.
We have a takedown request tool, which allows copyright owners to search and identify content that belongs to them. We’ll review it and take it down. The DMCA has a regulation, I think 24 hours. We’ve received a lot of praise for the time it takes us—we have somebody manning it around the clock, and content that’s copyrighted and is [identified with] this tool is taken down within minutes of being uploaded.

If a [takedown] is uploaded again, it doesn’t even make it to the queue. We automatically reject that content.

We’re pretty excited about the next generation of that tool. Right now, if the same ten-minute clip is uploaded again, that clip is identified and removed, but it has to be the identical ten minutes. Now, with audio-fingerprinting, we’re able to identify and take down any sub-segment of that ten minute clip. It requires the copyright owners’ cooperation to inform us of what content is actually owned by these guys, but after we’ve established a library of [copyrighted] content, their content will get flagged. In terms of technology and approach, we are generations ahead of [other] user-generated sites.

Some say that this wave of user-generated content and social networking has created the biggest generation gap since rock ’n’ roll. What do you think?
I would hope that YouTube is a platform for delivering entertainment, unspecific to age, demographic, economic status, or geographic location. There’s a huge well of content, and anybody who wants to search can find something they’re interested in. That’s what we’re moving toward, in terms of simplifying and translating the product, so that anybody can find content they like.

So you think all generations can enjoy YouTube?
Yeah. Take cooking, for example: I’d love to be able to search on YouTube and find a chef’s video on how to julienne an onion correctly. I think there are different types of content and there are different subcultures. The biggest barrier is still technology. I showed my mom how to go online and search, and now she’s on the site all the time researching things she’s interested in. There are very distinct types of content—what she watches, versus what I watch, versus what a typical 16-year-old watches. At the same time, there’s still a big gap between [what my mom can do] and what a younger population can do—take a video, cut it up, and upload it online. We’re going to battle this challenge and make it easier.

The huge popularity of social networking sites is based on a deep human need to share experiences. Any idea why humans love to share so much?
I think you hit it on the head with the viral nature of these social services; not just YouTube, but the viral nature of the Internet. Go through the psychological analysis of coming across an interesting piece of anything on the Web, whether it’s a Web page, an image, or a video… The first thing I do is open up my mail composer, copy and paste the link, and send it to a group of friends. I think it’s almost an egotistical thing to be the first one in a group to find something interesting and send it out to everyone. The explosive growth of YouTube is built on that fact.