Review: The World Is Watching

Mr. Kyncl breathlessly celebrates a revolutionary medium that has unleashed new, “staggeringly popular genres of content, from beauty vlogging to video game commentary to unboxing videos.” Mr. Allocca notes that YouTube could well unleash “hours of programming from an endless array of channels suited to the specific tastes of everyone.” But just as it was with Mary Kay’s vast competitive sales force, very few will get the prized pink Cadillac.

The YouTube reality is that less than 0.1% of videos reach one million views in their first month—the threshold required to earn $900 in advertising revenue. Barely 30% of the posted content is viewed 100 times a month, a number that YouTube will not even recognize for advertising. Although thousands of YouTube users may be earning ad income, few will be able to quit their day job. As for YouTube being the center of homemade content by “the rebels remaking media” (Mr. Kyncl’s subtitle): Of the 100 most-watched videos in YouTube history, only four were not professionally produced music videos.

This is not to say that no “rebels” are making money on YouTube. The Swedish producer PewDiePie, known for his online commentary and video-game reactions, reached 50 million subscribers at the height of his channel’s popularity. But, as this newspaper noted last year, some of PewDiePie’s videos contain anti-Semitic jokes or Nazi imagery. The backlash got PewDiePie kicked off of YouTube’s premium channel.

Perhaps PewDiePie will have to transition to the popular YouTube genre known as Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response. The current star of ASMR is Maria (no last name needed), whose most popular video, according to Mr. Allocca, consists of 16 minutes of Maria whispering “in a voice so soft and quiet that you can hear the light smacking of her lips opening and closing, her tongue connecting with the roof of her mouth, her breath passing through her teeth. . . . Ten minutes later, Maria is rubbing a feather across her face.” So far, Maria’s videos have been viewed 250 million times. P.T. Barnum was surely right.

PewDiePie and Maria—along with more-recent examples such as

Logan Paul

and his infamous “suicide forest” video, and teenagers recording themselves participating in the “challenge” to swallow Tide Pods—are not outliers of weirdness but rather the heart of YouTube’s clickbait culture, which encourages the kind of content you would never see on your most outlandish cable channel.

The use of YouTube for pedophile videos and Islamic State propaganda is another big controversy plaguing YouTube. After advertisers began pulling their ads, YouTube announced that it was “demonetizing” the problematic content. No longer would pedophiles or jihadists receive ad revenue. But the videos continued to stay up on the site.

Messrs. Allocca and Kyncl, unsurprisingly, do not weigh in on these problems. No mention either of the role YouTube plays as the most important online distributor of Russian propaganda; no disclosure of how much advertising revenue YouTube passes on to the Moscow-funded RT television network. Rather, these books fall under what must be called YouTube’s “native advertising”—blatant PR content.

These disturbing issues are of course shared by other sites, such as Facebook. Operating under the federal government’s “safe harbor” protection—which limits their liability for content uploaded by their users—neither YouTube nor Facebook must face the responsibilities and questions that traditional media organizations deal with every day: Are we publishing something that is both true and contributing to the public’s understanding of the world? These new-media companies, of course, know that much of their content doesn’t meet that standard. But their answer up until now seems to be “that’s not our problem.”

Last week YouTube vice president

Paul Muret

announced that the company was making some major changes to its advertising platform because of advertiser complaints. It seems Messrs. Allocca and Kyncl’s bosses are finally realizing that major changes are needed. Time will tell if anything improves.

Mr. Taplin is the director emeritus of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and author of “Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.”