When I was thinking about a website that has been significantly shaped by the audience, the first thing I thought of was YouTube. Literally, audience participation is in the name – you.
It was created in 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim and was bought by Google in 2006.
Different people use YouTube – make up artists; beauty bloggers; gamers; music artists, as well as television companies, to name a few. TV companies use YouTube as a second platform to advertise their shows. Gamers use YouTube to talk about the newest games, even uploading videos of them playing said games, which gains a massive following. Beauty bloggers have become increasingly linked to YouTube over the years, with the rise of vloggers like Zoella, Tanya Burr etc.
Even with the rise of this particular section of YouTube, the word ‘vlogger’ has become a standard term – someone who creates video blogs.
YouTube was created by three people. The first video on YouTube was uploaded by one of them, Jawad Karim –
But the people behind YouTube don’t come up with the content alone, it’s up to the users to upload. It’s not just the videos, but the interaction that users can have on the site. Users can both like and dislike videos and leave comments below and even the comments can receive likes or dislikes and comments or ‘replies’. Like a comment Inception. You can subscribe and ultimately make YouTube your own, with a home page dedicated to videos you may like or channels you’re subscribed to. Without audience and user participation, YouTube would cease to exist.
Network Society and the Media 
I found this amazing, Jo! Even though I use YouTube everyday, I never thought about it like this, maybe because it’s in plain sight. I have watched the video and also thought about audience participation when I saw there are actually parodies about the first video on YouTube.
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