YouTube
Wayfinding: Spotlights > Platforms > YouTube
YouTube is one of the largest and most-used video platforms online; YouTube itself measured global viewing time as more than 1 billion hours per day. The approach to creating content for : originally, it hosted five-minute vlogs with ‘the byline “Your Digital Video Repository,” a statement which conflicts somewhat with the now-notorious exhortation to “Broadcast Yourself”’. Fifteen years have passed since Burgess and Green published their book analysing YouTube’s rapid success as a sharing platform, and now the site mainly focuses on content creators who monetise sleek product-promoting videos inspired by vlogs, but which are narratively closer to advertisements. However, : ‘YouTube is an archive of legible performances, including productions of Beckett’s video works, certainly the principal venue of their performance today, no doubt providing the “text,” so to speak, for theatrical performances, too'. As mentioned earlier, theatre scholars and lovers use YouTube to watch clips of their favourite shows, research famous older shows, and even find new shows through YouTube’s recommendation algorithm.
Many of the digitally engaged theatre makers I interviewed had formative experiences making work for YouTube: ‘I came up doing theatre specifically, by producing my own theatre in small venues all over New York, and then that bent into early YouTube culture’. Brendan Bradley also worked with a sketch comedy group that livestreamed their pieces on Facebook Live; he has explored multimedia live performance practices since well before the pandemic. Similarly, Peter J. Kuo, who livestreamed his show In Love and Warcraft on YouTube in 2020, told me that he learned a lot about community engagement by becoming an early YouTube adopter in 2009:
I wanted to create, to exercise my creative license. And so, I started learning about shooting and making videos, and scripting, editing, posting it up … I think, a lot of people, when they start with that kind of stuff, they’re like, ‘The views, the views!’ They want to get the views. But it was the engagement. It was people watching it and then commenting on it and then responding to them.
Both Bradley and Kuo remained engaged making theatrical and narrative works for YouTube because of the audience engagement afforded them, which led to community building rather than monetisation.
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