Synopsis
Across the world, people watch more than a billion hours of video on YouTube every day. Every minute, more than five hundred additional hours of footage are uploaded to the site, a technical feat unmatched in the history of computing. YouTube invented the attention economy we all live in today, forever changing how people are entertained, informed, and paid online. Everyone knows YouTube. And yet virtually no one knows how it works.
Like, Comment, Subscribe is the first book to explain exactly how YouTube’s technology and business evolved, how it works, and how it helped Google grow to unimaginable power, a narrative told through the people who created YouTube, the Google chiefs who took it over, and the stars born on its stage. It’s the story of an industry run amok, how a blind faith in technology resulted in the unraveling of truth, the spread of violence, and the corruption of the internet—and how a company scrambled to tame its creation that had spun out of control.
Mark Bergen, a top technology reporter at Bloomberg, might know Google better than any other reporter in Silicon Valley, having broken numerous stories about YouTube’s and Google’s business and scandals. His deep access within the companies makes Like, Comment, Subscribe a thrilling, character-driven story of technological and business ingenuity and the hubris that undermined it.