As a media company, YouTube is a platform for and an aggregator of content, but not a content producer itself. It is also home to an incredibly diverse body of content, ranging from corporate media products, to political activism, to personal vlogs. Though the site is now owned by Google, YouTube maintains the image that primary beneficiaries are still the individual users and viewers. Everyone can watch videos on YouTube. People can see first-hand accounts of current events, find videos about their hobbies and interests, and discover the quirky and unusual. As more people capture special moments on video, YouTube is empowering them to become the broadcasters of tomorrow.At its inception in February 2005, YouTube was one of several competing services that sought to facilitate online video sharing by helping users upload, view, and engage with videos without much technical knowledge . Though the site was similar to the other video hosting sites, by 2008, YouTube was "consistently in the top ten visited sites" on the web, and accounted for "37% of all internet videos watched in the United States, with the next largest service, Fox Interactive Media, accounting for only 4.2%" (Burgess et al., 2009). One of the aspects of YouTube that led to the dramatic expansion during the first few years of its existence was the ease with which people could share the videos by embedding the content in blogs, networking sites, and websites, allowing it to piggy-back off of the growth of other major social networking sites (Burgess et al., 2009). |