After Google bought out YouTube in 2006, the site continued to expand and between the 2010 and 2011 years, videos were being watched billions of times a day. This is when advertising was introduced into the site in attempts to make a profit from the sites growing popularity.
October of 2010, Chad Hurley decided to step down as CEO and assume an advisory role instead, with Salar Kamangar replacing him as the temporary head of the company. It was not until February of 2014 that they appointed Susan Wojcicki, the woman who housed the startup of Google, CEO of YouTube. While under her leadership, the company had achieved 1.5 billion logged in users a day and YouTube’s percentage of female employees has increased by about 6%. In addition, as the years went on, YouTube launched new and improved versions of itself. Versions that could be advertisement free, more geared towards gamers or children, mobile applications, etc. Although all of these changes occurred over the years, YouTube still remains one of Google’s top subsidiaries. (“The History of YouTube”) Since Google has been the parent company of YouTube for about 11 year, it has had many major influences on the site.
One of the biggest influences being the advertising. Google is the parent company to AdSense and DoubleClick which directly relate those two companies to YouTube since they are all owned by Google. Google has perfected the way to introduce ads into its search engine that cater to the users’ specific likes and dislikes. Depending on what you type into the Google search engine, ads appear that are similar to what you look for online. Now, YouTube uses the same concept with the way they show ads before every video that you are more likely to click on (Sweney). Also, the same idea is put in place for how the YouTube website is set up. On the homepage of the website, the first things that pop up are a list of “Recommended” videos to watch or a list of channels you have subscribed to.
Here we focus on the “Recommended” videos which are videos that the user has yet to watch, but are somehow related to previous videos that they have viewed. This method shares a lot of similarities with the way that Google decides which advertisements to display on Google web searches. The part that I find interesting is that Google and Alphabet Inc. are technically one in the same, so the ownership is very similar. All of the companies owned by Alphabet Inc.
, Google and YouTube tend to be heavily technologically based, so it seems that they all interconnect and influence each other. Tracing back the ownership of these companies really only takes you to a very small group of people. The ownership of Alphabet Inc. would be traced back to the founders–Larry Page and Sergey Brin–who also happen to be the founders of Google, who now own the most popular video sharing site in the world since their company (Google) bought out YouTube. Of course there a few more very important people that have to do with the ownership of these companies, who happen to be: founders of YouTube (Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim), CEO of YouTube (Susan Wojcicki), and CEO of Google (Sundar Pichai). After doing all of this research, I do not really think of YouTube any differently. If anything, I like it a little more.
The fact that YouTube has mainly been circulated through the same groups of people just gives it more of a familial feel. Starting out as an idea to be a video dating site and becoming one of the most successful websites in the world is incredibly impressive. For three guys who were tired of their day job to just come up with a concept that changed the world is mind blowing. People have been given the ability to share whatever it is they please, whether it be beauty tutorials to vlogs traveling the world to video game tutorials. YouTube has become a platform that creates jobs through creating content and discovering new artists.
It has revolutionized journalism by creating a way for people to see and hear news from all over the world through a play button. Discovering that Google is the parent company to YouTube only really makes sense. Google’s mission is to further technology, and every minute of every year it keeps growing–as does YouTube.