Book: Streampunks

Streampunks: YouTube and the Rebels Remaking Media by Robert Kyncl,‎ Maany Peyvan.

This book surprised the living hell out of me.

I knew back in the early 1980s the way the online world would shake out. The videotex (Viewtron, Gateway, etc.) and per-hour connect-time online services of then (The Source, CompuServe, etc) were all wrong. Bulletin Board Systems were the future. And they were. For what happens when you find a way to connect what are basically BBSes (servers) all together with a markup language (HTML)? The Internet.

Even back in the 1980s, the genius madman William von Meister was looking to start up a service that delivered music online. This was 1981 — before iTunes, before the Macintosh, before there was even MP3! How’s that for foresight?

So what did I miss?

Video. I can’t believe I missed video. Talk about missing the damn elephant in the room! This is especially embarrassing because in the 1970s, I was all about TV and movies — I’d grab Variety off the newsstand every damn week and read it nearly cover-to-cover (man, those special trade show issues were thick and required days!).

My first glimpse of video for the masses was a demo of QuickTime 1.0. It was laughable, really. Postage-stamp size and pixellated as hell. VHS cassettes delivered a better picture.

Even when video improved to the point where I was using YouTube, I still missed the damn elephant.

No part of my brain ever yelled: “Hey, dummy! YouTube is television. Television has stars. YouTube will create stars too!”

And YouTube has.

If you still disbelieve — or haven’t even thought of it — here is your new frame of reference for YouTube:

One of the biggest efforts we made at YouTube to boost the credibility and staying power of our creators was an attempt to bridge something we internally referred to as “the Mad Men gap.” By 2013, several of our most popular stars were drawing audiences larger — in some cases much larger — than their counterparts on cable. Bethany Mota, an eighteen-year-old fashionista vlogging about clothes from her bedroom, had more people tuning in to her channel every week than Project Runway did. More people were watching Rosanna Pansino, who baked cupcakes in the shapes of her favorite video game characters, than Iron Chef. And Vice, whose raw global news and documentary footage was targeted at Millenials, was pulling in larger audiences than Anderson Cooper 360°. All told, more people in the United States were watching YouTube than any cable network.

You might scoff and object with: “But on the basis of time, more people still watch TV!”

Perhaps. But do you know who watches the most TV now? Old people! The kind of viewer who is most likely to live a frightened existence because they have Fox News on all damn day. Even when people of other ages watch a TV show, it’s usually online. And even when broadcast, cable, and other (online) are lumped together, the total number of viewers for everything TV is still down drastically.

Corporate Television — as it should be called — no longer has the audience attention it once had.

Any why should it?

It can’t do what YouTube can. Corporate Television has a minimum program length (with many ads) of 30 minutes. A YouTube video can be shorter than a damn ad on TV! And videos can be any length.

YouTube can offer more than all of Corporate Television combined around the world.

Here’s a breathtaking example. Take quilting. Does anyone reading this blog ever even think of quilting even once in the course of a year? I doubt it. But there are millions of people around the world interested in that subject. How many quilting programs have you ever seen on TV? Could you find one today, that can air right now?

You can on YouTube. There’s an astounding chapter in this book called Stick To Your Quilting. If anyone had written it as a short story, it would have never been believed. Perhaps some people, after reading it, would have sighed and wished the world worked like that.

The closest thing in fiction that I’ve personally encountered is a W. Somerset Maugham story, called The Verger.

I cannot resist. I’m interrupting this post to embed the film version of that story via YouTube (the irony!). Stop reading and watch it before continuing.

The Verger (1950) W.Somerset Maugham

Let’s just put it this way: Albert Foreman became very rich after you factor in the change of currency valuation between then and now.

Now back to the quilting story.

The Doan family, living in California, had their savings drained in a medical emergency. They needed a cheaper place to live. They wound up moving to a town in Missouri that had a commercial strip that was mostly boarded-up. The father found a job and things went well until 2008. Remember 2008? Financial hell! He lost his job. Two of the children decided to buy their mother a quilting machine so she could make quilts to sell locally. They also rented a small store for that business.

Now comes The Difference. One of the sons suggested making a video of his mother doing a quilting tutorial and posting it on YouTube. These videos were shot on a Canon pocket camera. Professional TV/Hollywood production this was not.

Let’s cut to the chase because the story spans several years — a lot of YouTube videos — and the chapter itself should be read and relished.

People started asking for the cloth she was using in the videos. Eventually, the mother — Jenny — decided to start selling cloth. Then people starting showing up at the small store — from out of town. Because they’d seen the YouTube videos. The store began to attract more people. Like people who were coming in from all over the world.

By the time 2016 hit, this family had seventeen stores in town. All about quilting! Quilting! And they became the majority employer in town!

All that — because of an unplanned and non-professional YouTube video!

Now tell the damn truth: If someone had written that as a story, would you have believed it? I didn’t think so!

This book is filled with surprises like that. One of them is the story of Robert Kyncl, the author, who is now Chief Business Officer at YouTube. He was raised under censorious and repressive Communist rule, in Czechoslovakia. To go from that to YouTube is another just-about-unbelievable story. (So when you hear about “censorship” on YouTube, it’s from people who don’t really know what the hell real censorship is. Kyncl does!)

While I was busy paying attention to eBooks and self-publishing — the liberation (snort!) of writers from the gatekeepers of book publishing (ha!) — YouTube was busy behind my back liberating stardom from the Hollywood monopoly. And as anyone will tell you — despite the success of Stephen King, J. K. Rowling, and some others way at the top of the heap — there is more money (and will always be more money) in video.

This is a book that has to be read, whether you have an interest in video or even YouTube. It’s surprising, it’s inspiring, it’s informative, it’s thrilling, and just plain fun. I regret that I interrupted my reading of it for Jordan Peterson. I think it’s a more impactful book than Peterson’s.

Don’t wait. Go get it. If you can’t afford it, get a library card. Even if your library doesn’t own a copy, you can still borrow it through the magic of inter-library lending. It could change your life.

Because there’s one thing YouTube actually shares with book publishing in the end: There’s infinite room. Not an infinite audience or infinite time (god knows I have a backlog of several thousand books) but infinite room in the sense that if you’re interested in a subject, then maybe there’s an audience for it. And if you’re good, and if you’re lucky — the two biggest factors in all endeavors — you can change your current circumstances and build a following that can fund your life.

But don’t think I’m telling you that YouTube is a Get Rich Quick scheme (as many people thought eBooks were!). There are plenty of cautionary tales in the book; it’s not all Gee Whiz stuff.

But don’t let that stop you. Get it and read it!