> COVER STORY
Hurley has since stepped down as CEO of YouTube but remains at the firm as an advisor. When I meet Hurley, who with his beard and slow drawl reminds me of a Wild Western gunslinger, I ask him if that’s how it really began.
“It was a combination of things: Steve had some videos of a din- ner party, I had some family things I wanted to share – I was on the West Coast and my family was on the East Coast – and it really just came out of that. We had videos on our desktop and there were photo sites that allowed people to share their photos but there weren’t actually video sites, so out of that frustration, that’s how it was born.”
I put it to Hurley that the growing availability of broadband was the
reason YouTube succeeded when it did. “I think we were in the right place at the right time in terms of people having the devices to cre- ate the videos and the connections to upload them and view them as well, so that all just started coming together around the time we cre- ated the site. “We were lucky enough to just make it simple to upload and make it a seamless viewing experience and solve the problem of a need for a universal video player.” Hurley isn’t your typical Silicon Valley start-up honcho – most of these guys are engineers. He’s a fine art student – he designed the logo for PayPal where he met Chen and Karim – so I ask him how he got sucked into the Silicon Valley scene. The answer, he says, is that he sees a correlation between engineering and design. “Well, you need an art degree to think outside the box, I just was-
n’t focused on engineering. It’s not a formula to dream up these things but I think it was a great combination, not one person thinking an idea but someone actually building it. I’m not underestimating the value of engineering by any degree – you need to make it work – but I think it’s a play between engineering and design and you need a product people can relate to; not just from a user interface perspec- tive, but a brand the community you want to serve understands. Design is currently underrated as a need in the internet world.” I ask Hurley how it felt to be acquired by Google for such a vast sum and after just 18 months. “It felt pretty good I guess,” he dead- pans. “We were hoping for more but ....
“For us even just after 18 months we had multiple offers and we
turned them down because we saw an opportunity to continue the first phase. Coming from PayPal, we were lucky enough to survive
the dotcom crash, go public and be acquired by eBay, so we saw the potential of creating something people would use and hopefully that would be valuable and hopefully entertain and we would continue to run ourselves.
“Unfortunately we were too successful and growth surpassed our expectations and weren’t able to keep up on all fronts and we were short of infrastructure, people and cash – all of those things were in great need and were exponentially still continuing to grow.”
Combining with Google
When Google knocked on the door the time was right. YouTube needed cash and resources while Google wanted to build up its video serving business. “Looking at the reality of the situation and looking at Google – they
were trying to grow a video service at the time and we were trying to ramp up our advertising solutions and operations and rally, so it was a great combination. They had the sales team, the solutions and we had the video expertise and it came together and we’ve created a product that continues to grow.” He’s right about that growth – according to Google’s most recent quarterly results, YouTube is serving two billion videos a week accom- panied by advertising. The social impact of YouTube has been equal- ly enormous, enabling people who previously didn’t have a voice to have a voice and new stars to emerge. It was one of the ways reportage emerged during the heavily censored Iran election riots last year. “Well, you can never plan for it but they say if a picture’s worth a thousand words, then a video is a million. Emotionally for people to react to situations like Iran where it was a trending topic, you’d read an article and then see it in person, it’s really emotional. We still have a long way to go in terms of people producing their own video con- tent to a really high standard. “It takes much more work and some amount of talent to produce what people think is valuable, but for YouTube it has been about that; people expressing ideas or capturing a moment in time, telling a story…it’s a chance to gain visibility. That’s one of the things I’ve been happiest about; just to hear what the community is doing with it for politics, what is newsworthy. People that otherwise have been part of the traditional system recognise they have chance to go directly to the top.”
24 Marketing Age Volume 4 Issue 4 2010
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