...with Karim’s pixelated smirk, begins Mark Bergen’s fascinating Like, Comment, Subscribe, an account of the company’s journey from its humble roots, thrown together in a garage by two college dropouts and a graphic designer, to its world-conquering present — last year it hoovered up $28 billion in revenue...On the surface, YouTube’s story is one of astonishing success: snapped up by Google for $1.65 billion in October 2006, dishing out ad money to more than three million “creators” by April 2012, and today racking up 2.6 billion monthly users around the world...Behind the scenes, though, its journey reads like a two-decade game of Whac-a-Mole with the company trying to suppress crisis after crisis: the $1 billion lawsuit launched by Viacom over copyright infringement; the proliferation of conspiracy theory channels; the frequent appearance of porn in children’s videos; and the constant gaffes of some of the channel’s biggest stars.
Many books that purport to trace the rise of a dazzlingly successful technology company suffer from founder-worship. Mr. Bergen avoids this trap ... This waffling is sometimes apparent in Mr. Bergen’s book ... Mr. Bergen does take pains throughout his book not to insert his own views into the narrative, and for the most part succeeds; vitriol about former President Donald Trump occasionally flares up like a bad case of sciatica, but as a bug not a feature. Where Mr. Bergen does miss the mark is in examining the effect of the ideological monoculture that he acknowledges exists in Silicon Valley—and at Google in particular—and what it means for the decisions YouTube makes regarding content moderation ... Meticulously reported and fluidly written, Like, Comment, Subscribe nevertheless leaves the reader wishing that Mr. Bergen had been willing to do more to answer a crucial question posed by one of YouTube’s early employees and one that still bedevils its billions of users: 'Is YouTube net negative or net positive for society?'
Bergen offers a revealing look at how YouTube has struggled with that growth ... Bergen, who has covered Google for several years, deftly covers YouTube’s rise.
