Everyone had to see this. Sadia Harper called her YouTube colleagues to her desk early in 2007 to watch. On her screen a tiny preteen with a crew cut and an oversized dress shirt was belting a song by the R&B singer Alicia Keys. “This kid is amazing,” Harper said. The singer’s mother had been badgering her with emails to feature her son, Justin Bieber, on YouTube’s home page.
Harper was one of YouTube’s “coolhunters”—a team tasked with curating videos that appeared on YouTube.com and keeping their fingers on the site’s pulse. Right before joining Google, YouTube had cut a deal with Verizon Wireless to put its video player on select mobile phones; app stores weren’t yet a thing. The carrier wanted a handpicked selection, not the site’s normal free-for-all. Apple wanted the same thing for its new device, the iPhone; during a meeting, Steve Jobs had scolded the YouTube crew, “Your videos are shit.” So YouTube hired another alum from the music service Rhapsody, Mia Quagliarello, as an editorial director. She recruited Joseph Smith, or Big Joe, as everyone called him, a graveyard-shift video screener who posted his own YouTube clips and was remarkably adept at spotting budding viral hits before they exploded in popularity. Officially, the members of this team were “community managers,” but a colleague had dubbed them the coolhunters, a more resonant title.
By then YouTube was already a grand, expanding estate—full of aspiring comics, filmmakers, musicians, performers, hobbyists, and enthusiasts in every niche and of every age imaginable. (Briefly in 2006, one of the most popular YouTubers was Peter Oakley, a well-dressed British retiree who went by geriatric1927.) Many people landed on YouTube from a link sent by a friend or a web search. Increasingly they watched clips from the “related videos” panel sidebar next to the main footage. But a fair number still came in through its front door, YouTube.com. The coolhunters tended the front, selecting videos for everyone to see on YouTube.com. Sadia Harper, a high school friend of Chen’s, joined a few months after the Google acquisition. Each morning, she scoured a list she assembled of blogs on music, entertainment, tech, and architecture, searching for fresh clips to place on the home page. Small frames of each one, called the thumbnail, appeared on the site stacked in a row of ten beneath a “Featured Videos” banner. Her team swapped these slots every four hours, giving YouTubers behind the videos they selected a guaranteed cascade of views. Some leaped immediately into wider pop culture. Harper featured a music video with a catchy, whistling hook from a band called Peter Bjorn and John. A week later, Drew Barrymore wore the band’s T-shirt on SNL.
Quagliarello, the coolhunter boss, encouraged her team to make videos introducing themselves. Harper shot hers in her bedroom and added clips of do-it-yourself crafting, another emerging YouTube subculture. She solicited videos to be sent to her email address, which is where the little Canadian singer’s mother kept emailing. Harper had to politely tell Bieber’s mom that they preferred to feature original songs, not covers. Still, even when the coolhunters passed on a technicality, YouTube minted stars—a year later, a record executive would find Bieber’s videos on YouTube and make him a pop sensation.
More editors joined, each handling a select vertical on the site. A radio programmer came to curate music. Mark Day, the Scottish stand-up who found an audience on YouTube, was hired to handle comedy. Steve Grove, a young, earnest journalist from Minnesota, joined for “news and politics.” Blogging had resurrected noble ideals of citizen journalism—everyday people who could use the internet to document their communities, check facts, hold power to account. Grove started a channel, CitizenTube, spotlighting the genre’s practitioners on YouTube. “What do you think about Iraq or Social Security or abortion or health care?” Grove, donning a white YouTube T-shirt, asked viewers. “What do you think about the pothole outside your front door?” (Hurley, who rarely micromanaged, did make it clear he didn’t love political videos on the home page.)
YouTube’s editors were proud of discovering the undiscovered, those who were willing to post experiments and post often. They took risks themselves. In 2007 one video exploded on the site featuring a chintzy keyboard and a baby-faced singer named Tay Zonday, with a stunning baritone and bizarre, poetic lyrics. Dozens of YouTubers started taping their own versions of his song “Chocolate Rain.” As a lark the editorial team planned their first “takeover”: they filled the entire home page with tributes to the song. An engineer rushed over, panicked, assuming YouTube had been hacked. But the gimmick worked, and they orchestrated other takeovers periodically. If the editors felt uninspired, one colleague joked, they couldn’t go wrong with cats. Steve Chen loved cats, and so did the internet.
With Google’s cash YouTube began 2007 on a hiring spree, bringing in dozens of newcomers. Jasson Schrock, a web designer from upstate New York, arrived for his interview in a suit, unaware it was YouTube’s office “pajama day.” Once hired, he strained to work out the messy startup code behind YouTube’s video player, which had been strung together “like spaghetti.”
Then there were the Googlers. Just weeks earlier, some had been trashing YouTube as a band of pirates. Before the acquisition, as Google considered taking YouTube’s no-screening approach, a Google manager worried in an email that the company was inviting a “giant index of pseudo porn, lady punches and copyrighted material.” The first meeting in YouTube’s offices between its staff and the newcomers from Google Video was an awkward standoff. Steve Chen wasn’t sure if he should shake hands or throw a punch. It felt as if busy parents had dropped their kids off and then just left. You kids are living together now. Make it work. The enormity of the task they faced quickly dissolved any tension. Chen and Hurley went into endless calls with team after team at Google, working to integrate various back ends and business plans together. Googlers delved into YouTube’s code base and numbers. YouTube’s team filled out piles of Google’s new employee paperwork. It reminded Erik Klein, the YouTube engineer, of Brazil, the great cinematic parody of bureaucracy. (On acquisition day, Klein had told Brin that most YouTube engineers had failed their Google interviews or hadn’t bothered applying.) At times YouTube staff felt they had the wrong pedigree. Google recruiters routinely looked at SAT scores and Ivy League stamps, and the company bragged about an acceptance rate lower than Harvard’s. “It was this weird sea of bland, same-degree people,” recalled Julie Mora-Blanco, the YouTube moderator. “Like, ‘Oh, you got your MBA at Stanford, too?’ ” The YouTube crew, full of state school alums and dropouts, joked that they were townies on a college campus.
Some of the crew had more awkward encounters. On multiple occasions, Google’s CEO, Schmidt, who was married but openly dated other women, brought Kate Bohner, a former TV anchor he was dating, into YouTube’s offices and asked staff to give her advice on growing her YouTube channel.
Many Googlers arrived begrudgingly at the new video unit: YouTube didn’t yet have catered meals and the other perks Google lavished on its staff. One Google transplant, Ricardo Reyes, felt as if newcomers were the Empire’s stormtroopers marching into YouTube’s Rebel fortress. Reyes, a former Bush White House operator, didn’t have much of a choice about joining YouTube. He was a fixer for Google, the go-to publicity handler for crises. On a Friday that February, he had taken some Google staff out for a break, an afternoon showing of the new Spider-Man movie. When the movie ended, he saw his phone light up.
“Where are you?” a colleague on the other line demanded.
“Uh,” Reyes copped, “I’m at Spider-Man.”
“Get back to the offices. We’ve just been sued for a billion dollars.”
Viacom didn’t see YouTube coming.
Sumner Redstone, Viacom’s chairman and legendary mogul, had turned his father’s drive-in movie chain, formed in 1952, into a dynastic, backslapping, backstabbing media conglomerate. His holdings included assets as disparate as South Park, Survivor, SpongeBob, and Al Gore. Redstone had once dismissed the internet as “a road to fantasyland,” but by 2006 Viacom needed that fantasyland badly. Its primary business, pay TV, had peaked in 2000 at 83 percent of American households and then began an alarming decline. Viacom tried to buy MySpace but lost to its archrival, News Corp, the owner of Fox (“a humiliating experience,” Redstone admitted). Viacom offered $1.6 billion to Facebook, but the social network rebuffed it, another humiliation. Some at MTV, a Viacom station, had been keeping tabs on YouTube, and the suits knew clips from its shows were appearing on the video site without their permission. But Viacom was mostly preoccupied with another upstart: Grokster, a file-sharing website and subject of industry scorn. (Before buying YouTube, a Google executive derisively called YouTube in an email a “video Grokster.”)
Also, YouTube’s business didn’t make any sense to Viacom. The entertainment, the expensive productions, the artistry—they gave that away for free! And then placed ads beside it. “It’s like handing people keys to cars on the car lot, and selling hot dogs,” recalled a Viacom executive, who then thought of YouTube as “a couple kids in the basement engaging in piracy.”
Then Google paid $1.65 billion. Suddenly the kids belonged to an adult company. What followed is disputed. Shortly after Google’s announcement, Eric Schmidt sat down with Viacom executives and proposed a deal to guarantee up to $500 million in ad sales to indemnify YouTube against copyright claims. Viacom had proposed a figure closer to $1 billion, and the talks stalled over this gap and “other technical questions,” according to The King of Content, Keach Hagey’s book on Redstone. Another person involved from Viacom recalls a handshake agreement closer to $800 million. Then, according to this person, the Viacom team flew out to Google’s offices for a follow-up meeting around the holidays, at which point Google proceeded to undo everything. “It’s a funny company,” the Viacom executive observed. “When the CEO agrees on something, everyone else sees it as a suggestion.”
For its part, YouTube had seen Viacom coming with Zoey Tur.
Tur was well known as the most accomplished aerial photojournalist in Los Angeles. Before the Rodney King verdict in 1992, Tur had scoped out South Central, chatted with the neighbors and local Crips gang members, sorting out exactly where to park her helicopter as riots and police brutality unfurled. She did the same two years later, floating above O. J. Simpson’s white Bronco at just the right moment. The chopper cost $2 million, but payments from news channels for air footage like that more than covered costs. A decade passed, and Tur happened upon a video-sharing website. A few clicks, and there were her proprietary shots of the L.A. riots and O.J.’s famed Bronco playing on YouTube. Some clips even showed ads beside them. YouTube managed to keep nudity off its website. Why couldn’t they do the same for her footage? They never spent a dime or put their lives at risk to take these videos, she thought. Outraged, Tur sued YouTube in the summer of 2006 for violating DMCA copyright laws. YouTube removed the videos Tur flagged but argued that it lacked the tech and manpower to find every new upload. The suit lingered, and in October, Tur sat in traffic listening to radio news when she heard about the $1.65 billion acquisition. “Wow,” she blurted out. “Crime pays.”
Most of YouTube’s rank-and-file staff knew nothing about Tur’s lawsuit or the backroom meetings with Viacom. Micah Schaffer, the former hacktivist, prepared to head out for a weekend in February—a drinking weekend, because the Super Bowl was that Sunday—when Zahavah Levine stopped him. Viacom had just sent over 100,000 links to videos it claimed were uploaded without its consent. “Can you handle that?” she asked. Schaffer and colleagues had to delete them in batches to avoid overloading YouTube’s computers. This was only a prelude. Viacom had interpreted Google’s negotiation response as a sign that the search company was prepared for a legal fight. And Sumner Redstone, a lawyer by training, loved legal fights. He had installed another lawyer, Philippe Dauman, as Viacom’s CEO. Years earlier the two men had orchestrated a takeover of Viacom by threatening to sue its board as a bartering tactic, maneuvering, an admirer swooned, “like Leonard Bernstein and Stephen Sondheim writing West Side Story.” When you’re a Jet, you’re a Jet all the way.
Viacom claimed $1 billion in damages from Google on March 13, 2007. The opening lines of its lawsuit read like an indictment of entertainment’s greatest criminal mastermind:
YouTube has harnessed technology to willfully infringe copyrights on a huge scale, depriving writers, composers and performers of the rewards they are owed for effort and innovation, reducing the incentives of America’s creative industries, and profiting from the illegal conduct of others as well.
Viacom’s lawsuit claimed it had found, even after the Super Bowl weekend notices, some 150,000 clips on YouTube of copyrighted material, which had been viewed “an astounding 1.5 billion times.” Viacom wasn’t the only company suing YouTube. A year later, another lawsuit would come from a motley crew that included a French tennis team, several record labels, and Zoey Tur, who had dropped her suit to join larger forces.
The lawsuit sent immediate shock waves within YouTube.
David King, another refugee from Rhapsody, was just settling into his first assignment at YouTube when the stakes changed. Levine had struck a landmark deal with some record labels: they agreed to upload their songs into a database, which YouTube would use to find identical matches on its site using a “fingerprinting” technology. Labels could then ask YouTube to remove those matches, or they could reap money from ads on those videos (at least the portion that didn’t go to YouTube). King’s task was to manage a similar system for everything on YouTube, not just music. Interesting work, sure, though not something that brought him into contact with corporate honchos. But after the Viacom lawsuit his project to appease copyright holders became a matter of life or death. Suddenly King was invited into secretive meetings with Google’s general counsel and CEO, eager to hear his plans.
Steve Grove, the politics editor, had posted several CitizenTube clips a week when he first started his job. He imagined turning his account into a weekly show summarizing current events and political chatter on YouTube, à la Meet the Press. After the lawsuit Hurley advised Grove to tone it down; YouTube didn’t want to look too much like a TV network.
Viacom’s lawsuit hung like a sword of Damocles over YouTube, and Levine and other lawyers began devoting considerable amounts of time to the company’s defense. Every decision about every video now carried more weight. The gravity extended beyond just the issue of copyright. YouTube soon encountered more and more unexpected complications in an online world it had rushed to embrace. Schrock, the new designer, had started working on research studies, where YouTube invited regular people in for surveys. Once, Schrock monitored a session when a colleagued asked respondents what videos they liked to watch. “I like cage fighting,” a man replied quickly. “Watching animals fight.” Schrock stood slack-jawed. No one expected that. The man left and, like all research subjects, was asked to sign a nondisclosure agreement.
Even darker moments occurred, including a tragedy that echoed the horrors to come in Christchurch years later. In the fall of 2007 an eighteen-year-old walked into a high school in Finland with a semiautomatic pistol and murdered eight people before shooting himself. He was a YouTuber. He uploaded under the handle Sturmgeist89, posting about metal music and the Columbine school shooters. In videos he held a gun and wore a black shirt that read “Humanity Is Overrated.” He described on camera how his shooting would proceed, but his footage wasn’t flagged by viewers or YouTube’s machines, so moderators never saw it. Soon after the tragedy an email arrived in Schaffer’s in-box. The shooter’s father wanted to see videos of his son, an attempt to piece together the horror that had unfolded. YouTube had pulled them off-line and sent them to authorities. The father kept emailing YouTube his request.
Schaffer felt torn between helping the grieving father and keeping YouTube’s privacy standards that prohibited sending deleted videos. Unsure what to do, he never responded. Eventually, the emails stopped.