Abstract
We describe and analyze YouTube as a multisided platform with participants that include users, advertisers and content contributors, many of whom play dual and highly varied roles. YouTube’s role in structuring and managing relationships among platform participants with an eye to its own profitability is examined along with a sequence of elaborations on its business model that changed YouTube from a relatively simple service that sold advertisers access to web audiences generated by amateur videos uploaded by other internet users to a service that increasingly features commercial content from a diverse set of sources. This progressive layering of features that themselves are not inherently social on top of a social media foundation is similar to patterns of service elaboration exhibited by other social media services as they matured.
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Notes
- 1.
We used the “Advanced Title Search” on IMDb and framed our request as anything released between 1800 and 2012. The total number of results accounted for 2,219,335 and the earliest release was Sallie Gardner at a Gallop traced back to 1880.
- 2.
The brothers in “Charlie bit me” and their parents live in England. In a newspaper article on the video, Lyall (2012), reports the video was uploaded to YouTube by the boys’ father to share with a friend living in the United States in Colorado. It is a good example of how online viral communication can create unexpected hits. Although not uploaded for this purpose, the family has realized significant financial benefits from advertising revenues shared by YouTube and through related merchandise sales (Lyall 2012).
- 3.
- 4.
Vevo is a music aggregator owned by the major record companies (Stelter 2009). Vevo promotes its owner’s videos on its standalone website and partners with YouTube through the Vevo channel.
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Song, S.Y., Wildman, S.S. (2013). Evolution of Strategy and Commercial Relationships for Social Media Platforms: The Case of YouTube. In: Friedrichsen, M., Mühl-Benninghaus, W. (eds) Handbook of Social Media Management. Media Business and Innovation. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28897-5_36
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