[music playing] YouTube is a giant community made of millions and millions of channels and Hundreds of millions of users, and then in there, there's this little subsets of communities.

You find people who come from entirely different walks of life turning to a camera and making some kind of entertainment for people.

Really, anyone who watches a YouTube video can create a YouTube video.

In the YouTube ecosystem, all these different sensations and stars and different types of programming couldn't exist anywhere else.

[music playing] Broadcasting used to be one of those incredibly hard to access and difficult to get into mediums.

There's only so much bandwidth.

You need a whole lot of cameras.

You need professional writers.

But YouTube was created to a certain extent by the people who used it.

In this instance, that was the people who consumed content-- the audience-- and the people who created content, the people who were uploading material to YouTube.

The content on YouTube has a super fast feedback loop, and that helps content creators to understand relatively quickly what is successful.

And I think that that affects the types of content that get made.

I think that that affects the type of content that gets valued.

So along the way, people rethought what it meant to speak to camera.

Hello.

People rethought what it meant to create entertaining content.

People rethought or discovered or stumbled upon what it meant to connect with an audience.

So in traditional broadcasting, it was very hard for you to take risks.

But because it's so much easier for you to have a go and see if it would work on YouTube, we can create new forms and are creating new forms of effectively broadcast content.

And we have people now whose entire professional career is built on YouTube, and that's not necessarily a career that involves them leaving YouTube.

So YouTube has recapitulated and reconfigured of what we might think of as television.

YouTube has broadened what we think of as potentially entertaining, potentially valuable, and potentially important audiovisual content.

YouTube is very niche because there's millions of channels that people create, and anyone can create it.

And that's what's really interesting is that you make content and then you find people that are into the same thing that you are, which you can't do in television.

I guess an audience coming to Vsauce 1, 2, or 3 is coming to find out things that they didn't even know they wanted to know, so it's just for curious minds.

A lot of the ideas that we get for episodes are suggested by the viewers, and we want the audience to be aware of, like, we're just making this for you, spending hours just doing this and we want to respond and interact with you.

Engagement is generally really high.

Whenever we start an episode, we go, "Hey, Vsauce."

Hey, Vsauce.

Hey, Vsauce.

Vsauce.

Because it's not just us.

We're all Vsauce.

That is really the community.

We are a community, so people are just super engaged into it because it's kind of us making the content together.

Commenting is incredibly important because you find out what your audience wants.

Like I can make content and I can have 500,000 views.

But if no one tells me if they liked or disliked it or anything, then I don't know what I made.

This is something that's really just part of YouTube and why YouTube I think is so successful between audiences and creators is that unlike television, if there's something that I didn't particularly like about an episode or that I did like, if I comment about it, I can directly affect what is being made and see that change very next week.

But also subscribers are really important because then I can make content just for them because I know that they're subscribed and they're going to watch it.

I don't have to dilute or change what I'm going to make to appeal to a larger audience.

I just need to appeal to my audience, which are those subscribers.

That's just so cool, right?

That, like, people all over the world get to interact with each other and with me and I get to interact with them and we get to build this community and be part of something, and that's what drives me.

It's just how many people can we interact with and how many people can we find that are interested in the same things that we are passionate about?

I think the aesthetic of the way that bloggers shoot gives you a look into a part of their personal lives.

It's pretty much this framing, you know?

It's very intimate and close up.

It feels like you're talking to another person when you're watching it, and that definitely influences the aesthetic of YouTube.

When you have to be your own editor or your own director and your own promoter and marketer, that comes across in everything that you do and it feels very personal.

Hi.

I started making my videos with Windows Movie Maker and a terrible HP laptop webcam.

The aesthetics started very basic, and I don't think that's really an aesthetic choice.

I think that's more about necessity, but I think people are mainly interested in maintaining the aesthetic of YouTube because it does have that personal connection with your audience.

I'm talking directly to one person.

I think creators definitely have a responsibility to keep their content humble.

(MAKING GASPING SOUNDS) Get fired up.

So the best example I can think is DailyGrace.

Grace makes her videos kind of wherever she is.

She, like, sets up her camera on, like, a stack of books or something, just makes this frame shot so you see her shoulders and her head and turns to the camera to make jokes.

And I think when traditional broadcasters come over to YouTube, it's a big challenge for them to figure out how to gather that feeling that comes from just one person being in charge of everything.

It always have to feel that way or it doesn't feel "YouTube."

YouTube has been totally disruptive to the media business because it gives people another outlet for consuming entertainment.

There's literally a near-infinite amount of space in different types of programming that people can produce, so you no longer have to turn on your television.

You no longer have to the movie theater.

You can go to YouTube and fine tens of millions and billions of hours of programming.

Yes, there are shows on YouTube that look a lot like television shows, but there's also these YouTube shows that really couldn't exist anywhere else because they're using the tools inherent to the internet as part of their program.

They're using the inherent connectivity of the internet, the inherent feedback mechanisms, the user interactivity.

It really gives anyone the ability to get their message out to a huge massive audience.

And what happened is individuals who were big about the YouTube community banded together and thought, hey, with our powers combined, we can have more control over the ad dollars that are flowing into the space and we can pool all our viewers together to create these different types of networks and possibly better programming.

So different YouTube networks evolved.

There's Maker Studios.

There's Machinima.

There's Alloy.

There's Zephyr.

There's Big Frame.

There's Fullscreen.

Now that we have more established ways to revenue, more established user bases, more established viewers, you're seeing this other influx of tens of millions of dollars into the production of online video programming.

And then just like film, and how there's a certain kind of craft and storytelling that goes with that medium, then they're shown to develop the certain type of craft and storytelling that goes along with YouTube.

Kids that are growing up today, I mean, you hear anecdotes all the time about how they don't know the difference between YouTube and MTV.

And as that generation develops, they're going to feel as comfortable going to a website as they are turning on their television.

It's still a little wild out there, but it's not the wild Wild West that it once.

But I think it still has pockets and corners that are yet to be tamed, and I think that new pockets and types of content are going to bubble up.

YouTube fosters this very rich community for people, and you don't find that kind of conversation on any other online video site.

Doing a show on broadcast, you make your episode and then it's over.

There's this wall.

These videos live on forever that we put on YouTube.

It's always relevant.

Not since television was invented has there been this kind of programming that's developed that's spawned this whole new type of entertainment industry.

[music - "the youtube song"] (SINGING) We are the YouTube army, a ukulele band, with cameras in our hands.

We are the YouTubers.