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Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing

YouTube’s Rocky Road to the Top

Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing

The Motley Fool

Investing, Business

4.33.1K Ratings

🗓️ 28 August 2022

⏱️ 32 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Google’s acquisition of YouTube is now remembered as one of the most successful tech acquisitions ever, but that result was far from obvious in 2006. Bloomberg reporter Mark Bergen is the author of the upcoming book “Like, Comment, Subscribe. Inside YouTube’s Chaotic Rise to World Domination.” Dylan Lewis caught up with Bergen to talk about: - YouTube’s “Forrest Gump-like” tendency to be a part of world-changing events - The platform’s complicated relationship with its creator base - One missed opportunity around kids and education - The acquisition of YouTube, and its early days at Google Stocks mentioned: GOOG, GOOGL, META Host: Dylan Lewis Guest: Mark Bergen Producer: Ricky Mulvey Engineers: Dan Boyd, Tim Sparks Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0

Inside Google, YouTube took a long time for its business to really click.

0:04.9

There was an initial frustration for several years and you can go back and find a lot of

0:10.0

press reports about how YouTube was sort of serially unprofitable and kind of a drag on

0:16.9

Google for a long time.

0:18.4

I'm Chris Hill and that's Mark Bergen.

0:27.1

He's a reporter from Bloomberg and author of the upcoming book, Like, Comment, Subscribe

0:32.1

Inside YouTube's chaotic rise to world domination.

0:36.4

Dylan Lewis caught up with Bergen to talk about the rocky road that led YouTube to become

0:41.3

one of the most successful tech acquisitions in history.

0:45.4

As well as the complicated relationship YouTube has with the people who create video content

0:50.8

and how the platform has an uncanny knack for being a part of world changing events.

1:02.6

So YouTube is kind of forced gumballic in that there are all these seminal moments along

1:06.6

the way over the last 15 or so years where it is there.

1:09.3

It is a part of the conversation or it's where the conversation is happening.

1:12.7

And one of the things I was kind of struck by was you're embedding these videos as these

1:17.7

kind of reminders of what happened on the platform and what was important on the platform.

1:22.2

But that very act, the idea that content could be from over there and then brought here

1:27.2

onto a web page is something that YouTube kind of conditioned us to accept and really

1:32.4

made possible on the internet.

1:34.0

Yeah, totally.

1:35.0

I love that forest gump comparison.

1:37.4

This was, I think I mentioned it in the early in the book that like JavaScript that the

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