The gripping inside story of YouTube, the company that upended media, culture, industry, and democracy—by a leading tech journalist

Across the world, people watch more than a billion hours of video on YouTube every day. Every minute, more than five hundred additional hours of footage are uploaded to the site, a technical feat unmatched in the history of computing. YouTube invented the attention economy we all live in today, forever changing how people are entertained, informed, and paid online. Everyone knows YouTube. And yet virtually no one knows how it works.

Like, Comment, Subscribe is the first book to reveal the riveting, behind-the-scenes account of YouTube’s technology and business, detailing how it helped Google, its parent company, achieve unimaginable power, a narrative told through the people who run YouTube and the famous stars born on its stage. It’s the story of a revolution in media and an industry run amok, how a devotion to a simple idea—let everyone broadcast online and make money doing so—unleashed an outrage and addiction machine that spun out of the company’s control and forever changed the world.

Mark Bergen, a top technology reporter at Bloomberg, might know Google better than any other reporter in Silicon Valley, having broken numerous stories about its successes and scandals. As compelling as the very platform it investigates, Like, Comment, Subscribe is a thrilling, character-driven story of technological and creative ingenuity and the hubris that undermined it.

"The definitive, deeply reported account of YouTube, the company that upended media, culture, industry, and democracy-by a leading tech journalist Across the world, people watch over a billion hours of video on YouTube every day. The sheer amount of video produced there is beyond comprehension. Every minute, over five hundred hours of footage are uploaded to the site, the equivalent of eighty-two years of video added a day. That anyone can easily access any minute of this footage-and the trillion minutes more already on YouTube-is a technical feat unmatched in the history of computing. Everyone knows YouTube. And yet virtually no one knows how it works. Like, Comment, Subscribe is the first book to explain exactly how YouTube's technology and business evolved, how it works, and how it helped Google grow to unimaginable power, a narrative told through the people who created YouTube and the Google engineers and chiefs who took it over. It's the story of an industry run amok, and of how corporate greed resulted in the unraveling of truth, the spread of violence, and the corruption of the internet, all for the sake of profit. Mark Bergen, the top Google reporter at Bloomberg Businessweek, might know Google better than any other reporter in Silicon Valley, having broken numerous stories about YouTube's and Google's business and scandals. His deep access within the companies makes Like, Comment, Subscribe a thrilling, character-driven story of technological and business ingenuity and the hubris that undermined it"--