The American online video sharing and social media platform YouTube has had social impact in many fields, with some individual videos of the site having directly shaped world events. It is the world's largest video hosting website and second-most-visited website according to both Alexa Internet and Similarweb, and used by 81% of U.S. adults.
Constituting one of the world's most popular search engines, YouTube enables inexpensive distribution of educational content, including course material from educational institutions and "how to" videos from individuals. Worldwide video access has spurred innovation by enabling geographically distributed individuals to build upon each other's work, to collaborate, or to crowdsource.
YouTube has facilitated engagement between institutions and individuals, such as between universities and prospective students, and between businesses and employees. Also, some YouTube videos increase awareness of social issues (such as bullying, suicide and LGBT issues), allow broadened social contact (especially important for the elderly or mobility-impaired), and overcome stereotypes of minorities and minority viewpoints. However, other videos have included potentially harmful content, such as those triggering audiences, inducing self-harm, or inspiring additional bullying or suicides. Further, the website's recommendation algorithm has been found to recommend harmful content to children, and has promoted dangerous practices such as the Tide Pod challenge.
YouTube has become an important "visual journalism" platform, both for conventionally produced content from established news organizations and for citizen eyewitness contributions. Certain independent or alternative news organizations have established YouTube channels that reach a wider audience than traditional broadcast television.
YouTube has promoted democracy through free expression of individual political views, for example enabling Arab Spring protest videos to transcend national boundaries, causing certain regimes to censor or ban the website. YouTube has affected conventional politics, becoming even more important than direct mail in political campaigning, with politicians and governments using the website to directly engage citizens and promote policies. However, its recommendation algorithm has been shown to recommend extremist content, especially far-right and conspiracy propaganda, leading to claims that YouTube has been used as a tool for political radicalization. Concurrently, the website has been criticized for inadequately policing against false or misleading content.
YouTube streaming data (video views) has been used to gauge consumer opinion for marketing decisions. Celebrities and large companies, especially major music labels, have used YouTube as a focused advertising tool for targeted mass marketing and audience growth by placing banner ads and by contracting with video producers for embedded-product marketing. Conversely, individuals have partnered with advertisers to grow their own audiences, the "Partner Program" enabling individual content creators to monetize videos and even earn livelihoods directly from posting content, with top earners exceeding $30–50 million per year.
Effects on culture
Education and proliferation of knowledge
In his 2010 TED Talk on crowd-accelerated innovation, TED curator Chris Anderson preliminarily noted that human brains are "uniquely wired" to decode high-bandwidth video, and that unlike written text, face-to-face communication of the type that online videos convey has been "fine-tuned by millions of years of evolution." Referring to several YouTube contributors, Anderson asserted that "what Gutenberg did for writing, online video can now do for face-to-face communication," that it's not far-fetched to say that online video will dramatically accelerate scientific advance, and that video contributors may be about to launch "the biggest learning cycle in human history." (click on "Show transcript" tab) • Corresponding YouTube video from official TED channel was titled "How YouTube is driving innovation."
Khan Academy founder Salman Khan, a former hedge fund analyst, grew YouTube video tutoring sessions for his cousin in 2006 into what Forbes Michael Noer called "the largest school in the world"—a non-profit with ten million students and a reported $7 million annual operating budget (2012). By the end of 2013, Khan Academy's network of YouTube channels grew to 26,000 no-fee videos that collectively had been viewed 372 million times. Noer reasoned that technology had finally become poised to disrupt how people learn, given the advent of widespread broadband, low costs to create and distribute content, rapidly proliferating mobile devices, a shift in social norms to accept the efficacy of online learning and a generation of tech-savvy people willing to embrace it, with students watching lectures and working on their own schedule at their own pace.
Certain public school systems, non-profits, and charter schools use YouTube videos of outstanding educators in the training and professional development of teachers.
About 2,500 TED video lectures—delivery of which having been described by technology journalist Steven Levy as "an aspirational peak for the thinking set"—have collectively been viewed almost 250 million times on YouTube's "TEDtalksDirector" channel's network.
At a more micro level, individuals use YouTube to carry "how to" videos sharing their knowledge in areas such as cosmetics, and companies such as Ford Models use "how-to" videos to build their brands.
Studies by public health researchers have expressed concern about the impact of healthcare information available on YouTube, citing the potential harm to patients if inaccurate or dubious claims are presented as facts.
Searchable information repository Beyond being what a Forrester Research analyst characterized as the largest video platform on the globe, as of January 2012 YouTube was also the world's second most popular search engine. However, YouTube keyword searches are confined to metadata—video titles and labels—rather than the video content itself.
Spurring innovation through distributed communities In the year following YouTube's 2005 launch, some early video creators gained large viewing audiences, while others created small, tight communities among mutual watchers. In 2010 TED curator Chris Anderson described a phenomenon by which geographically distributed individuals in a certain field share their independently developed skills in YouTube videos, thus challenging others to improve their own skills, and spurring invention and evolution in that field. Legion of Extraordinary Dancers producer Jon M. Chu described "a whole global laboratory online" in which "kids in Japan are taking moves from a YouTube video created in Detroit, building on it within days and releasing a new video, while teenagers in California are taking the Japanese video and remixing it with a Philly flair to create a whole new dance style in itself." Such fields include dance and music, with Chu saying the Internet was causing dance to evolve, and journalist Virginia Heffernan calling certain music videos "a portal into a worldwide microculture".
Originally posted anonymously by a guitarist seeking suggestions on his playing, a 2005 YouTube cover of the "Canon Rock" adaptation of Pachelbel's Canon received millions of views and spawned hundreds of imitators in "a process of influence, imitation and inspiration". Journalist Virginia Heffernan asserted in The New York Times that such videos have "surprising implications" not only for YouTube, but also for the dissemination of culture and even the future of classical music.
YouTube has provided inventors an audience for market testing their concepts, and a platform—albeit an inherently profitless one—for disseminating innovations more quickly and more widely than writing papers or speaking at conferences. Collaborative "meetings", a global online equivalent of the Homebrew Computer Club, take place virtually, via video.
Three years after Google purchased YouTube and larger production companies had begun to dominate, a New York Times Magazine journalist said the website was "still incubating novel forms of creative expression and cultivating new audiences" as amateurs continued to create "microgenres" serving niche audiences, collectively creating what she described as an "art scene".
Collaboration and crowdsourcing
In projects such as the YouTube Symphony Orchestra and The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers, geographically distributed artists were selected based on their individual online video auditions, and assembled on the same stage to perform, respectively, at Carnegie Hall (2009) and at the Academy Awards ceremonies (2010).
A further step is to mix geographically distributed performances into a single work, without the performers ever physically meeting each other. Like-minded or compatibly talented individuals have used Internet communication to overcome geographic separation to create crowdsourced YouTube videos to encourage donations, such as Lisa Lavie's 57-contributor charity collaboration video "We Are the World 25 for Haiti (YouTube edition)" to benefit victims of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. Also CNN Saturday Morning News and CNN Sunday Morning (archives). The Tokyo Times noted J Rice's "We Pray for You" YouTube video, benefitting victims of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, as an example of a trend to use such crowdsourcing for charitable purposes.
The 2011 film Life in a Day, a feature-length YouTube-partnered documentary comprising scenes selected from 4,500 hours of amateur video footage from 80,000 submitters, was the first crowdsourced, user-generated film to be shown in cinemas. Director Kevin Macdonald explained that the film "wouldn't have been possible pre-Internet, specifically pre-YouTube".
Broadening awareness of social issues
The anti-bullying It Gets Better Project expanded from a single YouTube video directed to discouraged or suicidal LGBT teens. Within weeks, hundreds of "It Gets Better" response videos were uploaded to the project by people of various levels of celebrity, and, with two months, by U.S. President Barack Obama, White House staff, and several cabinet secretaries. In addition to "flashcard" testimonials by bullying victims and adults' encouragement videos, anti-bullying PSAs have taken the form of YouTube music videos; parenting author Rosalind Wiseman said the creators of one such video, Ahmir's YouTube cover of "Perfect", could "tell (the so-called experts) how it's done." Wiseman criticized a cyberbullying video commissioned to the American Bar Association.
Fifteen-year-old Amanda Todd's video, titled "My story: Struggling, bullying, suicide, self harm" and posted to YouTube the month before her suicide, became what the National Post called an "international sensation" after her death. The resulting extensive media coverage was controversial: though psychologists say there is value in airing related mental health questions, certain headline-grabbing coverage is thought by some possibly to inspire "clusters" of additional suicides. In addition to strong public reaction, legislative action was undertaken almost immediately to study the prevalence of bullying and form a national anti-bullying strategy.
YouTube personalities have used their celebrity status for charitable purposes, such as Tyler Oakley's outspoken support of and raising of tens of thousands of dollars for The Trevor Project, an organization for crisis and suicide prevention for LGBTQ youth.