unlike virtually any other website open to the masses, YouTube paid its contributors.

One reason YouTube had struggled to recruit TV networks was that networks wanted to use their own video players. So Kamangar and Google higher-ups voted to morph the site to allow them to do so; YouTube would show its own videos as well as links to clips from Hulu, CNN, and so on, something that looked like Google search.

Page and Brin, not yet thirty, pinned a ludicrously broad mission statement to their founding documents: Google would “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” By 2006, Google was applying this mission to anything the internet touched.

YouTube could be a threat to copyright owners but it could also be a very valuable tool for businesses looking for audiences.

As a plucky startup, YouTube could take all sorts of risks that Google, a public company with a big target on its back, could not.

most people used YouTube as a utility, a well of information, or a harmless pastime. But YouTube contained far more than that. YouTube’s

a group of young, creative oddballs had started to use the site religiously to build cultural touchstones all on their own.

The internet was not yet an enormous public stage, not yet the automatic place for people to share and overshare. Posting unpolished personal stuff felt weird.

YouTube was caught in the vortex. The company had rushed to expand across the globe, pushing citizens to broadcast in every language and nation they could, without putting enough staff in these countries to watch videos or deal with politics on the ground.