Pioneers 

In late 2004, three former employees of the e-commerce company Paypal decided they wanted to create a new video-sharing platform. These three entrepreneurs were Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. These individuals pioneered the beginning of youtube because they believed that ordinary people would enjoy sharing their home videos with the public. 

Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. 

The original idea behind youtube originated in 2004 at a dinner party in San Francisco when the founders realized how hard it was to share videos online. In February of 2005, On Valentine's Day, Hurley acting as CEO registered the domain, logo, and trademark of youtube. 

Early Adopters 

In the beginning, the three founders decided to create Youtube as a dating site and release it to a small set of users in 2005. This, however, did not gain traction and forced co-founders to start paying women $20 to post ads. Instead of most videos on the site being from paid ads, the founders were amazed as thousands of people started posting all kinds of content to the site. One of the first videos on the site was of Jawed Karim giving a commencement speech in 2007. 

Jawed Karim giving a commencement speech in 2007.

The individuals who first posted to Youtube were early adopters because they saw potential in the site as a video distribution service. These individuals had no idea that youtube would soon skyrocket.

In September 2005, investment firm Sequoia Capital invested $3.5 million in YouTube. A partner at Sequoia Capital, Roelof Botha, had worked at Paypal with the co-founders and heard about their new project.

Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha

 Botha had high hopes for the platform after he used it to upload old wedding and honeymoon videos. Roelof Botha was an early adopter of Youtube because even though the website wasn't popular, he still used the site to publish content. Early Adopters have much more control over their investments because the company is still developing. 

Early Majority 

In 2006 a video was uploaded to Youtube by two boys in China, lip-syncing to a song by the Backstreet Boys. Susan Wojcicki, Youtube's current CEO, who was in charge of Google's acquisitions, saw the video and credits it with convincing her that Youtube was worth an investment by Google.

 Boys in China lip-synching to the Backstreet Boys.

 After seeing the growth potential, Sequoia Capital invests another $8 million into the company bringing their total investment to $12 million. Youtube was finally bought out by Google later that year, and Sequoia Capital received a massive payout. 

In October of 2006, after a battle between Yahoo and Google, Google finally acquired Youtube for $1.65 billion, which paid out approximately $400 million each for the founders of the sight. As soon as the deal was done, Google moved the headquarters of Youtube to its new headquarters in San Bruno, California. Google was part of the Early Majority because they waited a significant amount of time before purchasing youtube. They watched as companies like Sequoia Capital invested $12 million before they even started to look at the possibility of investing in the platform. 

Late Adopters 

When Google purchased Youtube in 2006, youtube was experiencing negative revenue. They needed to make money, so Google incorporated its AdSense program on Youtube. Google saw an opportunity to not only profit from Youtube content but also connect with one of the largest audiences in the world. When google ads were placed on videos, they eventually brought in $200 million annually by June 2008. 

Google ads can be considered Late Adopters because they failed to implement advertisements until the company lost money. Late Adopters often show up late in the history of a company due to skepticism about the product or service.  

Laggards 

In December 2009, YouTube partnered with Universal Music Group to create the music-video site Vevo. Their business model was built on the fact that Youtube would handle the platform's technology while Universal Music Group sourced the content. Both companies agreed to share ad revenue. Universal Music Group can be considered Laggards because they partnered with Youtube after the site gained billions of views and had already been invested in by countless companies. 

To put this into perspective, In 2009, youtube had 100.9 million viewers that watched 6.3 billion videos on YouTube. This could be because Universal Music was skeptical about partnering with Youtube until they saw the numbers that were being generated. Ultimately Universal Music was last to partner with Youtube for unknown reasons and can be considered Laggards.

Response to Twitter presentation

 

While watching our class’s history of Communications Technology, I found the evolution of twitter interesting. Prior to this presentation, I wasn’t aware that the first tweet was sent out by Jack Dorsey when he stated, “Just setting up my twttr.” I found this interesting because the first tweet was posted on March 21, 2006, the same year that Google purchased Youtube for $1.65 billion in November of 2006. It is hard to believe that both Youtube and Twitter saw the beginning of their company around the same time. 

While watching this presentation, I was interested in how the platform evolved and developed. I learned that the app developers bought out Odeo in 2006 and started Obvious Corp to develop the app further. I wanted to get more information on Obvious Corp, so I did some research. I found Obvious Corp’s first product as an application called Medium, similar to Quora or Tumbler. To have enough space to develop their start-up ideas, Obvious Corp leased a 75,000-square-foot office in San Francisco on market street. One aspect of Twitter that I did not hear about in the presentation was the name change Twitter had. Twitter was originally named Twttr but was changed in July 2006. 

In conclusion, after watching the presentation on Twitter, I was pleasantly surprised to see similarities in the dates of creation shared by youtube. The presentation shows that Twitter has grown tremendously since its start-up and will continue to evolve and change to fit our society. 

YouTube and its impact on the World

 

Youtube is becoming one of the most viewed video distribution sites on the internet, accumulating 3 billion hours without content every month. Over 500 hours of video content are estimated to be uploaded every minute to the platform. 

With all of these videos, one might ask how the famous video-sharing platform started and how it has dominated the internet today. 

With the rise of youtube in 2005, the platform has changed significantly. The platform was initially created for amateur videos to be posted online. This led to the emergence of a new profession in the content creation industry. This profession is a Youtube content creator, which has turned ordinary teenagers into millionaires overnight. 

Like many other startups, Youtube was born in Silicon Valley and saw its beginning as a makeshift office constructed in a garage. The idea of youtube originated from a dinner party in San Francisco in 2004. The main idea behind the video-sharing website was that they were frustrated by how hard it was to share video clips online. 

Three members formed the original founders of youtube, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. These were all former employees of the e-commerce company Paypal. The main idea that the group had was that ordinary people would enjoy sharing their home videos with the public. 

Within the first few months of operation in May of 2005, youtube was attracting more than 30,000 visitors a day. By the time they went public with the company in December of 2005, youtube was showcasing more than two million videos per day. This number rose exponentially as more people started to find out about the new video-sharing website. In March of 2006, more than 20,000 new videos were uploaded to youtube every day. 

With this new surge in growth, Youtube was forced to purchase more equipment and broadband connections to the internet. The founders had to deal with an unseen issue: putting money aside for potential legal battles as media companies discovered that videos on the platform contained copyrighted material. 

As the platform continued to grow and the responsibilities as owners kept growing, the group decided to look for a buyer. At this time in 2005, the search engine company Google launched its own video-sharing platform called Google Video. This platform did not perform well, and Google parched youtube for $1.65 billion in stock in November of 2006. Instead of revamping the whole platform, Google decided to continue on the path that the original creators intended for the platform but with new tactics. Google was aware that one of Youtube's biggest downsides was copyright infringement. To combat this, Google negotiated deals with a significant amount of media companies that would allow their content to be shown on Youtube. Google also removed thousands of videos that included copyrighted material from their website.   

Like any other company, youtube needed to get money to operate; before being parched in 2005, the company reported a monthly income of $15 million. At this level of income, Youtube was not profitable when Google bought it, but a return on investment was not what Goole was looking for. Google saw the potential in Youtube as a video-sharing platform, so they were ok with taking a company with negative revenue in the beginning. Google was focused on the fact that Youtube would take off as the number one video-sharing platform. Google eventually needed to add its Google advertisement service onto Youtube, which eventually brought in $200 million annually by June 2008. To get an idea of how far Youtube has come since its creation in the last quarter in December of 2019, youtube reported $46 billion in revenue, equating to $10.7 billion in profit. 

Since its curation, YouTube has dominated video sharing on the internet and provided jobs and opportunities to hundreds of thousands of creators around the world. Youtube is truly an invaluable resource for information sharing that has maintained its popularity since 2005. The platform continues to evolve and change but has allowed video created around the world a platform to post on, and it has forever altered video sharing across the globe. 

Eight Values of Free Expression

 After looking over the speech theories, it has become clear that Individual Self-Fulfillment resonates with me more than others. Free speech and freedom of the press are core fundamentals that drive our constitution. Other countries do not always have equivalent rights of speech. Jail time or even death if an individual speaks out against the government or other political party. 

To understand self-fulfillment, we first need to understand the origins of free speech, which dates back to the ancient Greeks. The Greeks paved the way for U.S. citizens to have the right to express opinions without government restraint. Free speech originated from the ancient Greek word “parrhesia,” meaning “free speech.” This term was first seen in Greek literature around the fifth century B.C. It became a fundamental part of the democracy of Athens. Ideals regarding free speech shapes democracy.  

These principles were adopted by the First Amendment, which protects all U.S. citizens’ rights to free speech. The first amendment was adopted on December 15, 1791, as part of the Bill of Rights. 

 As U.S. citizens, we often overlook the fact that speech is protected under the first amendment. Other countries do not have the right to express their views without severe repercussions. A great example of this is North Korea, where residents aren’t allowed to speak out against their leader Kim Jong-un. 

BBC.com stated that a market trader in North Korea under the code name Sun Hui created a network of covert communications. By doing this, Sun Hui put herself in grave danger. BBC.com stated, “If the regime knew of Sun Hui’s real identity, she would face severe punishment - imprisonment in one of the regime’s hard labor camps or even execution.” Punishment for freedom of speech In North Korea forces activities underground. Unfortunately freedom of speech is a right that is commonly overlooked and taken for granted in the United States.  

Even though free speech is protected under the First Amendment, not all social media platforms will allow it. This is because the First Amendment protects individuals from government censorship and this does not apply to private companies. Social media platforms are private companies and can censor any content on their platform. Social media platforms at times censor speech that would shed a negative light on their company. Some of the information that is censored on social media includes hate speech, obscenity, misinformation, and harassment. While most mainstream social media platforms will censor certain content, other platforms have arisen to fill the void. A great example of this is the Telegram app. 

Telegram is a free-speech encrypted messaging platform that was created as an alternative to Twitter. More and more Facebook and Twitter users have migrated to telegram because they have stated that they are “committed to protecting freedom of expression and user privacy above all else”. Telegram has seen a recent spike in popularity, and they currently have over 500 million monthly active users. The application can be used on multiple different platforms, and the encrypted messaging attracts users who want to speak freely. 

In conclusion, Self-Fulfillment stems from our rights to free speech and expression protected under the first amendment. The Bill of Rights protects Americans and allows us to share our views and ideals to create a better government and community. Without these rights, social media platforms would be controlled solely by the government, and self-expression would not exist. Ironically and tragically even the above opinions I expressed might put me and my family in harm's way if we weren't protected by the First Amendment. 

U.S. Supreme Court

 The US Supreme Court is the highest in the United States on a federal level. The Supreme Court has the task of managing the Judicial, Executive and Legislative branches of government. 

After watching the video on the Supreme Court, I was amazed by how long each justice member serves on the court. It was stated in the video that each justice serves the court for an average of sixteen years. This is a very long span of time, and after doing some of my own research, I discovered that the new average term for supreme court justices is 28 years. Now that Justices are spending a large portion of their lives working as judges, finding a suitable nominee is essential. 

The President chooses these nominees, and after researching, I have discovered that there has been a shift in how new justices are chosen. Fixthecourt.com stated that “It’s no longer a priority to find the best candidate for the job who will serve with integrity and who has broad life experience.” This is interesting because now that each justice is receiving a Life tenure, both political parties want a Judge that hopefully will live a long time, not just someone fit for the job at that time. They are less concerned with honorable qualities such as integrity, fairness and positive vision of the feature. Fixthecourt.com also went on to state that “the party in charge scrambles to find the youngest, often most ideological nominee.” This points to the fact that Supreme Court justices are becoming younger and younger, forcing political parties to speculate who they believe that young Judge will become. 

While watching the video, I became interested in the fact that they have to take a new photo every time a new Justice is added to the court. For some reason, I didn’t imagine new members being added that frequently. 

While learning about the photo-taking process, the video’s narrator said something that resonated with me. He stated, “though trained in the law, they deal with human dilemmas”. This was fascinating for me to think about because it is up to the Supreme Court to make the final decision about our nation's human rights. The justices have to be concerned with the heart of the issue and understand human nature. This quote was very eye-opening because  Supreme Court Justices are powerful people, but they are also still human and as humans are fallible.