YouTube at 20: The video platform transformed screen entertainment. Now it could change a lot more

The Peabody Awards recognized YouTube in 2008, a little over three years after Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim launched it on Feb. 14, 2005. I remember this because I was on the board that debated whether it was too early to award a website that, as former NBC anchor Brian Williams put it at that year’s Peabody ceremony, “changed the very meaning of electronic communication.”

At that time, YouTube’s boast that 15 hours of video were uploaded to the site every minute was staggering, along with the hundreds of millions of views it drew from around the world. But its long-term impact on so-called legacy media, TV and movies was still unknowable.

One colleague viewed the possibility of YouTube eroding the resilience of the feature film and television markets as distant at best. Why? Because YouTube was mainly a distraction for mobile phone and computer users, he declared confidently. Besides, he added, “Who wants to watch a movie on their phone?”

Twenty years later, the answer to that is . . . nearly everyone.

YouTube is the biggest video service on the planet, although precisely how big – as in, the count of videos housed under its umbrella – is data that Google, its parent company, holds close to the vest. A recent BBC report cites an estimate by Ethan Zuckerman, director of the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, placing the total number of videos on the site somewhere around 14.8 billion in 2024.

But there is no question that YouTube is also by far one of the most widely adopted social media platforms in the United States, with around 83% of adults reported as having used it, according to the Pew Research Center; among adults 18 to 29, that number sits at 93%. 

YouTube is elated to broadcast some numbers underscoring its dominance, including its recent report that viewers worldwide stream more than a billion hours of content on their TVs every day. That’s televisions, not handheld devices or computers — which one would assume drives that number a lot higher.

Maybe not, though. In his annual letter released on Tuesday, Feb. 11, CEO Neal Mohan bragged that TV is now the primary device for YouTube viewing in the U.S. by watch time. It has held the top position in streaming watch time in the United States for two years, according to Nielsen.

Mohan also emphasized podcasts’ popularity on YouTube, where users watch their favorite podcasters instead of simply listening to episodes. And in the realm of cord-cutting, YouTubeTV is the biggest threat to conventional providers; it is now the fourth-largest pay-TV service in the country with more than 8 million subscribers.

Long before Instagram and TikTok injected jet fuel into influencer culture, YouTube democratized screen-based entertainment and opened the star-making pipeline to the world.

Many of the biggest names in pop culture parlayed their popularity on the platform to cut a pathway into its established system. Academy Award nominee Ariana Grande owes her recording career to a friend sending videos of her song covers to a record executive. Megan Thee Stallion, Dua Lipa, Chloe and Halle Bailey, Charlie Puth and Justin Bieber all introduced themselves to the world on YouTube.

So did “Insecure” creator Issa Rae, whose first series “The Mis-Adventures of Awkward Black Girl,” premiered there in 2011. Bo Burnham, Lilly Singh, “Adam Ruins Everything,” “Hot Ones,” “Broad City” and “Letterkenny” are but a handful of the many performers and series that built their fandoms on YouTube – along with the recently concluded “Cobra Kai,” the crown jewel of YouTube Red, the platform’s short-lived foray into original scripted productions.

Over the years, the platform has come to favor creators with the means to make professional-looking content shot on sleek sets and using high production values. They are the reason Mohan brags in his 2025 letter that “YouTubers are becoming the startups of Hollywood,” and established media companies have their sights on YouTube-cultivated talent.

According to a report in The Ankler, Netflix is angling to secure deals with some of YouTube’s top creators. One of the biggest so far may be Amazon’s reported $100 million deal with Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, to create the recently introduced Prime Video competition series “Beast Games” involving 1,000 players competing for a $5 million cash prize. 

The crossover exposure on Prime Video coincides with Donaldson’s YouTube channel subscriber base growing from more than 240 million to 362 million. (“Beast Games” also drew negative publicity and a lawsuit filed on behalf of five unnamed contestants against MrBeast and Amazon in Sept. 2024, Variety reported. This happened after Rolling Stone and the New York Times reported contestants’ claims of inadequate food or medical care, and crew members’ allegations of an unsafe working environment.)

YouTube presents a generous earnings model for creators. But that also incentivizes politically skewed content masquerading as news and information. In 2017, technology columnist John Herrman described in a New York Times story the ascension of right-wing content creators as an underexamined development, with implications akin to the conservative movement’s takeover of AM radio in the late ’80s and ’90s. Herrman drew contextual political parallels to “the value [YouTube] places on personalities; its reliance on monologue and repetition; its isolation and immunity from direct challenge; its promise to let listeners in on the real, secret story.” 

“Comparing YouTube to talk radio is also a useful reminder of how potent a medium can become while still appearing marginal to those who don’t care for it or know much about it,” Herrman added. 

Today we may view that observation as something akin to informed precognition. Although YouTube has community standards forbidding “pornography, incitement to violence, harassment, or hate speech,” calling those open to interpretation in our retrograde cultural atmosphere is putting it mildly. Ask any extremely online “Star Wars” or Marvel fan.

You might also notice many stories about red-pilled young men tumbling into the racist, sexist manosphere referencing YouTube as one of its major gateways. (Salon reached out to Google’s press department with a request to speak with a representative about this and other aspects of YouTube’s operations and did not receive a response.)

With younger consumers obtaining most of their news from podcasts, TikTok and, yes, YouTube, the field has never been more fertile for slanted disinformation brokers to mold the public’s perception of policies and cultural trends to suit the whims of the highest bidder.   

Pew reported that in 2024, around 32% of adults got their news from YouTube, slightly edged out by Facebook’s 33%.

Traditional news organizations also have a robust presence on the platform – as does PBS, whose extensively researched history, culture and science documentaries live on its dedicated channel. But each organization’s popularity is dwarfed by the most popular podcasters’ dedicated audiences.  

With podcasts serving as the new talk radio gathering space, YouTube reports that its users watch some 400 million hours of podcasts monthly from their living rooms. The data point called out the company’s year-end culture and trends report for 2024 wasn’t Joe Rogan but the 528 million views for Shannon Sharpe’s ascendant Club Shay Shay with more than 83 million of that total racked up by its wild Katt Williams episode.

But Rogan’s popularity, especially related to the politicians he platformed or did not, is part of the reason Business Insider dubbed the 2024 presidential contest “the YouTube” election.

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For all these reasons, when Mohan declares that YouTube will remain the epicenter of culture, he’s not bluffing. “For over a decade our mission has been to give everyone a voice and show them the world,” he wrote. “That means we provide a platform for free speech and creative expression unlike any other.”

In his Feb. 13 article, BBC technology journalist Thomas Germain offers another way of looking at the service’s worldwide ubiquity. “For all practical purposes,” he writes, “one of the most powerful communication systems ever created – a tool that provides a third of the world’s population with information and ideas – is operating in the dark.”

YouTube’s founders originally intended it to be an online dating service, only to abandon that goal upon discovering its true utility in its user-friendly upload interface.

What inspired them was that they couldn’t find the infamous 2004 Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction online. More than two decades later, along with several documentaries and a short-lived social reckoning, you can find several versions of that clip on the service and elsewhere. That, along with video essays and reactions interpreting what it meant.

Today I have more empathy than ever for that colleague from long ago who trusted in the permanent certainty of theater screens and long-established TV studios. In the same way that the caveman staring up at the night sky could not possibly conceive of how Galileo Galilei would transform our relationship with modern physics, there was no way anyone could know what YouTube would become.

Twenty years into its existence, nobody can predict the extent to which it will remake ours in the years and decades ahead. But we should try. That starts with paying closer attention to how it is shaping and employing its cultural influence instead of simply marveling at what’s trending.