Rats. The place was teeming with rats. In nooks between the ventilators and the ceiling, beneath the floorboards. God, more every day.
By early 2006, YouTube had moved into a bigger office to accommodate its rapid, surprising growth. It was kind of a mess. The start-up occupied the second floor above Amici’s pizza in San Mateo, a satellite city near San Francisco and train lines, and the twentysomething software engineers rarely cleaned up after their meals, resulting in an endless rodent problem. Someone placed two plush toy rats on YouTube’s reception desk, company mascots. The office was horseshoe shaped, with a stairwell in the middle and rows of makeshift desks, tacky fluorescent lights, and gray carpets. Hurley and Chen shared a corner table near the few windows. Hurley had commissioned an artist to paint spiraling red and gray stripes on the walls to represent bandwidth and maybe spruce up the place. They hung cheap white sheets from the ceiling as dividers. They bought bulk Costco snacks for employees, as Google did, some of which rotted in the back of the fridge. Each new hire had to assemble their own IKEA desk and chair, a ritual signaling the start-up’s scrappiness.
Hurley and Chen had formed a board and recruited business operators to join their coders, but the company kept its raffish quality, even as it drew more attention. MC Hammer, a bygone-era star, visited in February to check out the trendy new site, and Kevin Donahue, one of the recent hires, gave him an office tour. Staff recorded it and posted the resulting clip on YouTube (title: “Hammer Time!”). A Forbes reporter came by to watch a popular clip of a stepfather playing a cruel joke: while his kid was deep into a video game, he flashed a sinister face on-screen, prompting terrified sobs. “That’s just wrong,” said Chris Maxcy, another new YouTube business hire. Others laughed. Donahue described their site to Forbes as “raw and random.”
Just a few months earlier YouTube’s operational costs were still loaded on Chen’s credit card, and the company was barely hanging on. Mercifully, YouTube found a savior. Chen and Hurley, who were still tracking new accounts on their site, spotted his name that summer: Roelof Botha. Roelof had money. At PayPal he was the money guy—he served as chief financial officer—and had since moved to Sequoia Capital, a famed venture capital firm that once backed Google. A tall, pragmatic South African with a business degree and a geek’s fetish for tech novelties, Botha had recently taken a new digital camera on his honeymoon in the Italian countryside. He posted some footage to the site he had heard about through the PayPal network. Buzz outside the network was also building. In August, Slashdot, an influential tech news site Google’s founders read, gave a shout-out to YouTube, bringing in waves of fresh traffic. Botha reconnected with his former PayPal colleagues and drafted a memo that month persuading other partners at Sequoia to invest.
By late August, YouTube had eight thousand visitors, who generated more than fifteen thousand videos. Botha crunched its numbers: YouTube was paying around $4,000 a month to serve videos, with each play costing a tiny fraction of a cent in computing oomph. YouTube could conceivably charge people for features, like special video effects, or it could make money with ads, as Google did. In his memo Botha noted the recent success of “user-generated content” Web 2.0 companies like Flickr and Tripadvisor, a crowdsourced travel site that had sold for more than $100 million. YouTube could net at least that much.
The memo worked. In November, Sequoia announced an investment of $3.5 million, praising the marvel of YouTube holding eight terabytes of footage, “the equivalent of moving one Blockbuster store a day over the Internet”—an astounding stat then, when Blockbuster still mattered. One Sequoia partner, Michael Moritz, would later call YouTube “the fourth horseman of the internet” alongside Amazon, Microsoft, and Google. Sequoia placed Botha on YouTube’s board and took 30 percent ownership.
The investment gave the startup enough money to rent its office in San Mateo above the pizza shop, where the rodents roamed freely. Once, Chris Maxcy, the fresh business hire, followed an awful smell to find a dead rat decaying in a trap near the office ceiling. Maxcy, who preferred slacks and button-downs, was the only one in the office to tuck in his shirt—Hurley and Chen, when they had to dress up, preferred untucked—but he was still playful. He held the dead rat at arm’s length in a trash bag. Micah Schaffer, a twenty-five-year-old newcomer with unruly hair, hipster jeans, and flannel, started recording a YouTube video.
“Let’s show this to Heather,” he quipped.
Heather was Heather Gillette, one of YouTube’s earliest hires and one of the few women in the company. She grew up nearby in Palo Alto, where her parents always rented their home, and as an adult she dreamed of buying her own. She wanted space for her dogs, cats, and two horses, and a flock of chickens she was thinking of buying. That summer she had found a perfect spot—a vacant lot beneath green rolling hills and a forest of redwoods. Elated, she pulled out a small handheld video recorder to share the perfection with her family. When she scoured the web for a way to send the footage, she found only a seedy-looking site, MPEG Nation, demanding $25. She had not heard of YouTube until she visited the home of Kathy, her childhood friend. Kathy’s husband, Chad Hurley, sat silently hunched over his computer in the dining room. Kathy explained Chad’s latest venture, a free video-sharing site, and Gillette walked over to see what he was up to. She had worked in customer service roles but was now between jobs and, thinking of the sprawling lot for sale, wanted a new one. “We’re not going to need customer service,” Hurley told her. “It’s free.”
But weeks later, on Gillette’s next visit to her friend’s home, Hurley had changed his mind. He needed an office manager.
And as office manager, Gillette had to deal with the rodents. She couldn’t stomach killing them. The animals she owned were like her “children.” Men on staff teased her for her affection.
But Gillette had more complicated problems than rats. Hurley had also asked her to handle screening.
To avoid having YouTube become a crass shock site, its founders had outlawed uploads of porn and extreme violence. Still, those came. Initially staff took turns on moderation duty, scouring for offenders during the workday; Chen scanned during his late-night, coffee-fueled binges. A software system they built let viewers flag troubling or rule-breaking videos. But the daily barrage of footage demanded a better solution.
Gillette hired ten moderators for a team called SQUAD (Safety, Quality, and User Advocacy)—some of the internet’s first frontline workers. They sat at computers that displayed a steady, unending queue of videos viewers had flagged. Four buttons appeared on their screens’ top right corner. “Approve”—keep the video up. “Racy”—mark the video as suitable for eighteen and older. “Reject”—remove the video. “Strike”—remove the video and add a penalty to the account. Too many penalties, and the account went down. Gillette recruited more reviewers for night and weekend shifts and purchased industrial-sized protectors to shield screens from other onlookers. At first, these reviewers sat right by the office entryway, but soon YouTube decided it might not be ideal for visitors to first encounter a row of people scanning the internet’s underbelly. So they were moved.
Micah Schaffer was tasked with writing screening guidelines. He printed out one “Reject” rule and taped it above his desk: “Just to clarify, if the only reason that genitals are not visible is because they are inside someone else’s genitals—that’s not racy, that’s a strike.” Porn caused problems: when YouTube courted Disney for a partnership, Disney suits complained about easily spotting still frames of adult videos on YouTube. A reporter once called on a Friday morning asking about the abundance of salacious material. Gillette stood up during YouTube’s lunch hour and told everyone in the office they needed to spend their weekend scrubbing the site of genitalia. It worked: the reporter never published a story.
But moderation was rarely as simple as merely spotting private parts. Schaffer and Jennifer Carrico, an attorney volunteering at YouTube, sat together in a room one week to work on the guidelines. After watching some of the borderline, surreal footage pouring in, the pair settled on a tactic: they pointed at each body part and wondered aloud where it could go. Can someone put a thumb in there? What do we do with videos showing that? At one point Carrico wondered, “What kind of Pandora’s box have we opened?”
Julie Mora-Blanco, a college classmate of Schaffer’s, joined the SQUAD in the summer of 2006. YouTube paid her $45,000 a year with health benefits and equity, which she found incredible. Colleagues warned her about all the evils she might encounter, or so she thought. One morning, early in her tenure, she saw a video that would haunt her for more than a decade to come. “Oh, God,” she cried once it began. Later she would only describe it as involving a toddler and a dimly lit hotel room. A co-worker talked her through next steps: hit “Strike,” nix the account, and feed it to a nonprofit that monitored child exploitation and alerted federal authorities.
But those haunting videos, along with explicit porn, were really the SQUAD’s only clear-cut zones. When moderators had questions, footage often went to Gillette. She could watch most evils with a level head and found adult porn amusing. Anything bleak involving animals—fetish clips of women in heels stepping on creatures, cats being boiled alive—Gillette had to hand off. She also had nightmares for years about the few she did see. Mora-Blanco and her colleagues used dark jokes as a coping mechanism for this traumatic work—a running one involved an octopus and sexual consent—but they also felt deeply proud of their jobs keeping YouTube’s nascent web community safe and sanitized.
Soon Gillette’s job extended to keeping YouTube in good legal standing. Hurley approached her one day with a small slip from a company that housed YouTube’s computer servers; it said that YouTube had broken the law. “Do you think you could handle copyright?” Hurley asked.
From the early garage days, Hurley knew the legal risks of running pirated footage without approval from copyright owners. As YouTube grew, so did takedown requests from old media. (In instant message chats, later surfaced in a lawsuit, staff complained about these requesters variously as “copyright bastards” and “fucking assholes.”) But Hurley also knew that if the copyright owner did approve, and YouTube simply wasn’t aware, it would be stupid to take videos down. In October 2005 a user named joeB uploaded a three-minute, mesmerizing clip of Ronaldinho, the soccer superstar who had signed with Nike. Was it pirated? The video went gangbusters, and YouTube kept it up. They soon learned that joeB belonged to Nike’s marketing department. And that drove home a key lesson: YouTube could be a threat to copyright owners but it could also be a very valuable tool for businesses looking for audiences.
At the start of 2006, YouTube had another potential joeB on its hands: “Lazy Sunday.”
Saturday Night Live, NBC’s legendary show, was entering its fourth decade and growing stale. In a revival attempt it began airing “digital shorts” from new cast members like Andy Samberg, a floppy-haired comic with a Disney-prince jawline. His troupe’s skit “Lazy Sunday”—two white guys rapping about cupcakes and The Chronicles of Narnia—appeared on YouTube in December and went viral. Hurley sent an email to NBC: If you didn’t put it up, we’d happily take it down. Just let us know. For weeks no one answered, and “Lazy Sunday” continued to rack up views. Then, on February 3, an NBC lawyer finally replied in a stern letter demanding YouTube remove the sketch and all videos tagged “Saturday Night Live” or “SNL.” Kevin Donahue, YouTube’s new vice president, tried to convince NBC of the promotional value of keeping such viral content up. The value to YouTube was clear: that month most web searches bringing people to its site were the two words “lazy Sunday.” Eventually, YouTube did pull the clip, but most visitors the skit drew in stuck around. For other copyright claims Gillette tried to comply swiftly, which irritated the engineers, who worried that too many video removals would turn people off from uploading.
By 2006 programmers had most of YouTube’s frequent outages under control, though there were occasional hiccups. An annoyed viewer once called into YouTube’s office line and left a voice mail. “I need to goddamn masturbate, and I can’t do that when you don’t have all those videos up,” he shouted into the phone. “Get your shit together, you goddamn whores.” Staff laughed nervously. Unnerving messages like that, the NBC drama, the sprawling, unfettered moderation mess—it all made one thing terribly clear: YouTube needed a full-time lawyer.
Zahavah Levine loved music more than anything. When she was nine, she took the subway to the Philadelphia Spectrum to see Kiss, screaming along, “Shout it out loud!” She had had an enormous blues record collection until some asshole stole it during law school. Levine had wavy brown hair and a fighting spirit; at school she protested South African apartheid and the contras in Nicaragua. After Berkeley Law she was swept into the dot-com explosion happening across the bay, an industry plowing into digital frontiers and desperate for lawyers.
This was the roaring 1990s. Once the province of colleges and computer nerds, the internet had come to the masses. In 1995 sixteen million Americans went online from their homes; that number had jumped nearly tenfold by 1998. Surfing, shopping, banking, screwing—everything was moving online. Congress and Bill Clinton’s White House faced immense pressure from all directions to regulate the web. Religious right scolds wanted to wipe out sex and other ills, free-market champions wanted fewer impediments to commerce, and media lobbyists wanted protection from intellectual property theft. The resulting flurry of muddled laws included two whoppers that defined the modern internet. In 1996 the Communications Decency Act went after “obscene and indecent” materials online and included a short provision, Section 230, that gave websites permission to remove smut and shielded them from liability for posts users wrote. In 1998 the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) provided ways for owners of intellectual property, like songs and movies, to claim rights online. In theory, the laws protected websites from lawsuits and copyright trouble.
In practice, the laws were far from clear. During their passage Levine first worked for a law firm that drew up “hyperlink contracts,” deals between companies that linked to one another’s websites. Such things seemed necessary until everyone got more comfortable online, and then they weren’t. In 2001, Levine found a job involving her true love: music. Listen .com ran the web music service Rhapsody, and one of Levine’s first tasks there was to explain how copyright law had knocked out Napster.
Napster was a fallen internet star. Music fans loved its free file-sharing system; the music industry hated it. Eighteen record labels sued Napster for copyright theft. Napster argued that it worked like a VHS player: people didn’t hold the VHS manufacturer responsible for videotapes they played. Courts did not agree. In 2001, Napster lost a California ruling, effectively sweeping it into the dustbin. Levine’s new company cut licensing deals with record labels to offer aboveboard on-demand streaming. She became an expert in the byzantine laws governing digital music. Within a few years, though, her tiny company risked obsolescence. Microsoft introduced a streaming service, and Apple released iTunes (ninety-nine cents a song).
Chris Maxcy had been a Rhapsody dealmaker before he left for YouTube, an upstart Levine had never heard of, and he started to send her messages: “We really need you. It’s doing well, you have to believe me.” Levine checked out YouTube and saw similar terrain to Rhapsody: scores of videos using popular songs as soundtracks, or just playing entire tracks with static images. But YouTube’s library contained far, far more than music. She interviewed with Hurley and Chen and faced a tougher grilling from Botha, the investor. YouTube extended an offer, but Levine was ambivalent, and much of her uncertainty stemmed from the DMCA. She called a friend and fellow lawyer, Fred von Lohmann, and asked him to meet after work at her usual watering hole, the Rite Spot Cafe, a dive bar in San Francisco’s Mission District. Levine arrived with pages printed out from the law, slapping them down on a table in front of her friend. Under poor bar light, she read directly from Section 512.
A website with copyright-infringing material—say, a clip from SNL—would not be held liable if one of three things happened: (1) the website lacked “actual knowledge” that the material was infringing; (2) the website didn’t get any “financial benefit directly” from the infringing material; or (3) the website, once it was notified of the material, took it down “expeditiously.”
“What does that mean?” Levine asked. What did “actual knowledge” mean for YouTube? The company didn’t even know who uploaded what, let alone whether copyrighted material was posted with authorization. YouTube had started running ads on pages where videos played, but they weren’t yet targeted based on the content. Was that ad money “directly” attributable to “infringing material”? So much of the DMCA was ambiguous. Newsweek had recently run an article calling YouTube the “video Napster.” Was that true?
Finally, Levine looked up at von Lohmann and asked, “Should I take the job?”
“Hell, yes,” he replied.
“But are they going to get sued out of existence?”
“Who cares?”
Few knew the DMCA like Fred von Lohmann. He had worked on one of its first prominent cases, defending Yahoo in a lawsuit over bootleg video game sales on its site. (Yahoo won.) Now he was a copyright gun for hire for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or EFF, a prominent Silicon Valley civil liberties group. One of its founders, John Perry Barlow, an eccentric former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, railed against government and corporate attempts to rein in the web. In a 1994 essay Barlow predicted the internet’s coming ubiquity and laid out the philosophy that would define Silicon Valley:
Once that has happened, all the goods of the Information Age—all of the expressions once contained in books or film strips or newsletters—will exist either as pure thought or something very much like thought: voltage conditions darting around the Net at the speed of light, in conditions that one might behold in effect, as glowing pixels or transmitted sounds, but never touch or claim to “own” in the old sense of the word.
The future was on YouTube’s side. Von Lohmann also knew that the site had hired at least one comrade: Micah Schaffer, the young staffer with the frank genitalia guidelines. Before YouTube, Schaffer had hung around with EFF staff and Cult of the Dead Cow, a hacktivist coding collective of rabble-rousers that supported dissidents. When Kevin Mitnick, a famed jailed hacker, was released from federal prison, Schaffer was there with friends filming a documentary. He had worked for Rotten.com, a repository of morbid and gross-out images created, in part, as an up-yours to the Communications Decency Act. (Many images came from medical texts.) “We love you, Micah,” von Lohmann would tell him. “But there are some things that we can’t unsee.” If YouTube was Napstered, von Lohmann then told Levine, she would get an enjoyable front seat to one of the most important legal cases of the decade.
Levine took the offer. She arrived at YouTube’s dinky San Mateo office feeling, at thirty-seven, like a grandmother. A torrent of legal issues immediately rained down. One record label honcho, friendly before, now screamed at her that YouTube owed the label “hundreds of millions of dollars!” Even peaceful talks had bumps. Schaffer had set a cheeky placard above his desk after YouTube received multiple requests from German officials. (Germany had strict laws against displaying Nazi imagery, but YouTube, which had no office there, didn’t have to comply.) The placard read, do not appease the germans. It came down after Levine hosted a group of German record executives who did not get the joke.
But one of Levine’s strangest cases came after less than two weeks on the job. PETA, the animal rights group, suddenly demanded YouTube remove a video of a truck running over a fish. “Oh my God,” Levine said to a friend. “Is this cruelty? Where should we draw the line?”
freddiew: “Aces.” February 22, 2006. 1:22.
The title appears, followed by a twang and a whistle, an ode to spaghetti westerns. Two guys sit at a card table next to cheap dorm-room furniture. Camera zooms on the faces, cuts to the poker chips. Faces, cards, chips. Then the gimmick: there are eight aces on the table. The smaller guy flips the table, pulls out a gun, and leaps through the air, firing, pure Quentin Tarantino.
Freddie Wong, the smaller guy, had filmed this footage at the break room in New North, a freshman dorm at the University of Southern California. Everyone on his floor was a film student or wanted to be one. They scripted and shot their own videos on cheap Flip cameras, plugged them into laptops with a FireWire, spent hours editing, then showed them off. The school gave them only fifty megabytes of free computing storage, so Wong, prowling for more space to store his creations, stumbled upon YouTube. There he found like-minded young strivers: nigahiga, a Hawaiian high schooler who uploaded spirited lip-synching clips; Little Loca, the “Mexican-American homegirl,” an alter ego of a twenty-two-year-old from rural California. They were producers, directors, stars. They competed in an informal brinkmanship to see how quirky, irreverent, and attention grabbing their videos could get. Unlike American Idol, YouTube had no judges, only audience. It felt as if everyone watching YouTube were also creating YouTube videos.
In San Mateo, YouTube staff, enamored with this explosion, tried to keep pace. Once, after noticing how often visitors conversed with one another through video, Chen ordered up a new feature on a Friday. Over the weekend coders created a simple button to add a video response posted beneath another. Uploaders then flooded popular clips with replies to get attention.
YouTube’s systems started to reward persistence. Mark Day, a Glasgow transplant in San Francisco, tried his stand-up act before countless middling, half-attentive audiences at BrainWash, an open-mic city café that doubled as a Laundromat. On YouTube he stood before a bright yellow wall in his house, and the audience came to him. He posted a gush of clips in the emerging video blogging style—talk directly to viewers and talk fast, editing out any gaps between words. It was an instant dopamine rush hit when his first clip crossed fifteen thousand plays.
DeStorm Power, a physical trainer and musician in Brooklyn, had tried MySpace and obscure music sites to get noticed. A training client asked him if he could run a workout online, so Power posted grainy footage of his push-ups and leg routines on YouTube and saw that people were viewing them. Akilah Hughes, a college student in Kentucky who dreamed of becoming the next Oprah, watched “Lazy Sunday” go viral; here was a way to create a portfolio if you lacked the right connections. I might as well get an account, she told herself. I’m on this website every day. Young video makers of color, like Power and Hughes, were some of the earliest YouTube adopters, in part because they knew how much old media was stacked against them.
These pioneers felt an easy camaraderie on the site. “It was a cool club for the kids that really weren’t that cool,” recalled Justine Ezarik, a graphic designer from Pittsburgh who started posting as iJustine in 2006. After gaining some traction on the site, she moved to Los Angeles to room with Brooke Brodack, the gap-toothed teen who uploaded as Brookers. The club kids got a name: YouTubers. By spring of that year Brookers had become the first certifiable YouTuber star. More than a million watched her “Numa Numa” lip sync. YouTube had created its subscription feature the prior October, and by that summer Brodack had more subscribers than anyone else. She moved west after the NBC late-night host Carson Daly found her clips and reached out, offering a job with his show. “I just love that no middleman is involved,” Daly cooed about YouTube. “There’s no agent, nothing.”
In his dorm room, Freddie Wong obsessively watched these stars rise, tracking the elements and formulas that made their footage go viral and spread as easily as breathing. On his own account he ran tests, posting clip after clip. His jackpot: Guitar Hero. At a friend’s apartment, Wong filmed himself for five minutes playing the popular video game as a shameless blowhard. Wong had boxcar glasses, a mop of black hair, and instant nerd charisma on-screen. And he performed the game with phenomenal mastery, snapping its toy instrument in half at the end like Jimi Hendrix. The video broke through and put freddiew on YouTube’s map.
Years before Instagram influencers and TikTok stars, these young creatives invented an entirely new model of fame, luring in audiences not yet trained to spend hours of their days absently flipping through the internet.
Back then, no YouTuber went as viral as Bree.
lonelygirl15: “My Parents Suck . . .” July 4, 2006. 01:01.
Bree, a teenager, sits close to the camera in a maroon shirt, clutching a stuffed animal in her lap. Curtains of brown hair frame a small heart-shaped face with a delicate mouth and magnetic, swooping eyebrows. “I’m really upset right now,” she laments.
Mesh Flinders knew Bree would be a hit the first moment he saw her. Flinders, a struggling screenwriter, had pitched scripts all over Hollywood featuring a character he invented: a nerdy homeschooled girl who obsessed over theoretical physics and boy problems. But he had no takers. He had nearly given up on his entertainment dreams when he found YouTube, a website full of nerdy kids escaping, posting hours of strange, confessional, experimental videos. At a karaoke bar he met a collaborator, Miles Beckett, a plastic surgeon in training who wanted to make movies instead. Flinders pitched his idea. “I want to make a show about a girl that disappears,” he told his new partner.
They opened a YouTube account, lonelygirl15, and held a casting call, where they found Jessica Rose, a nineteen-year-old straight out of acting school, to perform as Bree, vowing to pay her once the experiment succeeded. (Rose, when she first heard the pitch, understandably thought it was porn.) Web cameras back then used a slightly distorted lens, a fish eye. When Rose leaned in, her features were magnified, “a face made for a browser screen,” Wired would write. She appeared as Bree in her bedroom, doing what other YouTubers did: lip-synching, making carefree chatter. She talked about her friend Daniel. She replied to comments. In her July 4 video she complained about her parents prohibiting a trip with Daniel, dropping hints that her family was mixed up in a cult. Behind her was a bed with soft peach pillows and a nightstand covered in pink faux fur.
The video was shot in Flinders’s apartment off Pico Boulevard. He had spent a few hundred bucks at Target to outfit the room as a teenage girl might. While Beckett filmed, Flinders punched out scripts for their next YouTube video in the corner. The pair had by now teamed with an entertainment lawyer, whose wife played Bree offscreen, writing to fans and keeping up the ruse. Flinders had scripted an elaborate story line involving the occult, which would unfold bit by bit like an epistolary novel. But he soon realized that letting fans direct his plot worked way better. One suggested a romantic spark between Daniel and Bree, so he wrote it that way. It felt as if they were inventing the future of entertainment.
Within two days the July 4 video surpassed half a million views, an audience on par with a cable TV hit. Flinders called his partner. “Holy shit,” the screenwriter said. “This is working even faster and better than we thought.”