Mark Bergen

The gripping inside story of YouTube, the company that upended media, culture, industry, and democracy-by a leading tech journalist

Across the world, people watch more than a billion hours of video on YouTube every day. Every minute, more than five hundred additional hours of footage are uploaded to the site, a technical feat unmatched in the history of computing. YouTube invented the attention economy we all live in today, forever changing how people are entertained, informed, and paid online. Everyone knows YouTube. And yet virtually no one knows how it works.

Like, Comment, Subscribe is the first book to reveal the riveting, behind-the-scenes account of YouTube's technology and business, detailing how it helped Google, its parent company, achieve unimaginable power, a narrative told through the people who run YouTube and the famous stars born on its stage. It's the story of a revolution in media and an industry run amok, how a devotion to a simple idea-let everyone broadcast online and make money doing so-unleashed an outrage and addiction machine that spun out of the company's control and forever changed the world.

Mark Bergen, a top technology reporter at Bloomberg, might know Google better than any other reporter in Silicon Valley, having broken numerous stories about its successes and scandals. As compelling as the very platform it investigates, Like, Comment, Subscribe is a thrilling, character-driven story of technological and creative ingenuity and the hubris that undermined it. 

Inside YouTube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination

Like, Comment, Subscribe

"Sharp and engaging" - The Times "The intricately-reported, elegantly-crafted story of the website that came out of nowhere, to change everything." - Brad Stone, author of The Everything Store and Amazon Unbound ----------------------------------------------------- Now, for the first time ever, discover the story of YouTube: how it started, how it works, and how it came to control our culture. It has entertained us with cat videos, flash mobs, gaming streams and Charlie Bit My Finger. It has educated us with makeup tutorials, DIYs and delicious recipes. It has changed us with advertising, extremism and political propaganda. Since its foundation in 2005, YouTube has existed on a pendulum. Its emergence established a valuable space for unique and important voices to share themselves and their views, and made global stars out of everyday people such as PewDiePie, Shane Dawson and Ryan Higa. It invented the attention economy we all live in today, forever changing how people are entertained, informed and paid online. At the same time, countless extremists have found a home on YouTube, using it to spread misinformation and propaganda - sometimes with real-world life-and-death consequences. The site is massively profitable for its parent company, Google (Alphabet), which has aggressively grown it into a ruthless advertising conglomerate with little regard for its impact beyond the bottom line. In Like Comment Subscribe, Bloomberg tech journalist Mark Bergen delivers the definitive, page-turning account of YouTube. Exploring the stories of the people behind the platform, he tells the story of a technical marvel that upended traditional media, created stars of everyday people, and ultimately changed the world through untamed freedom of speech.

Mark Bergen

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