The Hurley Burley of modern life

It’s not every day you meet someone who’s amassed a fortune of over a quarter-of-a-billion dollars, but that’s the net worth of YouTube CEO Chad Hurley. Remarkably, Hurley – who co-founded YouTube with fellow ex-PayPal employees Steve Chen and Jawed Karim – is still only 30. Like 24-year-old Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Hurley and his business partners have managed to translate their tech-savvy and knowledge of their peers’ cultural interests into a phenomenally successful online business.

The second of three children, Hurley was raised near Birdsboro, Pennsylvania by a financial consultant father and a school teacher mother. After studying at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, he moved to California to work for PayPal, where he met Chen and Karim. YouTube came into being in 2005, when the trio wanted to share some videos they’d made with friends.
With emails being rejected because of size and posting online also proving problematic, Hurley and co. devised a user-friendly site that allowed people to post videos within minutes. YouTube – for which Hurley designed the distinctive logo (something he’d already done for PayPal) – rapidly became one of the most popular sites on the internet, and currently receives hundreds of thousands of new videos each day. In October of 2006, Hurley and Chen sold YouTube to Google for $1.65bn.
Inevitably, as with any new internet phenomenon, there have been controversies. For various reasons, YouTube has been blocked in certain countries, including China, Iran and Syria. In one of the most bizarre cases, access to YouTube was blocked for a period last year in Brazil, when MTV VJ Daniela Cicarelli, ex-fiancée of Brazilian footballer Ronaldo, initiated legal action against the site for hosting a paparazzo video of her and her boyfriend having sex on a Spanish beach.
In April of this year, Ronaldo himself became embroiled in a sex scandal, when he alleged that three transvestite prostitutes tried to extort money from him, by threatening to post a video of their supposed romp on YouTube. Closer to home, YouTube has come under fire for hosting videos of “happy-slapping” incidents amongst school age kids. There have also been copyright infringement lawsuits launched by Viacom, the FA Premier League and the Elvis estate. Google have said that they will fight the Viacom case – for some $1bn in compensation – all the way to the Supreme Court if necessary.
If Chad Hurley is worried about such developments, he does a pretty good job of hiding it. In person, he’s a laid back and softly spoken individual. In the week prior to this trip to Dublin, he spoke at the Google Zeitgeist conference in Watford (where other guests included Gordon Brown and Queen Rania of Jordan) and attended his first ever football game – the Champions League final in Moscow. Overall, there was plenty to discuss when Hurley sat down for a talk with Hot Press in a meeting room at Google’s Dublin HQ.

PAUL NOLAN: Given that YouTube has become such a massive cultural phenomenon, it must have completely surpassed all of your initial expectations.
CHAD HURLEY: I think it surpassed all expectations, because we didn’t really have any expectations. It was a simple idea; we were really just looking at our problems and the problems with online video. We were trying to solve that. We had videos on our desktops that we wanted to share with friends, so we went through the process of what was frustrating us. We were looking at the functionality of different video players and media formats, and trying to simplify that. The project started from there, and then along the way, we realised the potential and started bringing more people onboard. We saw the response, and it’s just grown day by day.

At what point did you realise that it was becoming hugely popular?
Probably when we’d served around a million videos a day. We were doing it with a relatively small team, and that has just continued to build to where we are today. We’re serving hundreds of millions of videos on a daily basis, and we receive over ten hours of video every minute. We never really knew where that growth was going to take us, but we noticed there was something bigger happening.

How did you go about growing the site beyond the hardcore of people who follow the latest online trends? Was it just a word of mouth phenomenon?
It was, and it became viral. I think it was because of the simple solutions that we came up with, plus the fact that we were giving people a video solution that they could take with them. Even if you weren’t participating, if you weren’t uploading videos, you could still come and grab a link, or a piece of code, to put on your website or blog. The fact that you could link back to our site exposed us to a lot of new people.

One of the great aspects of YouTube is that it’s provided a new route for young filmmakers, bands etc to reach a wide audience. That must be a nice upshot of its success.
Yeah, we have a large audience which is kind of unique and special. It’s a global audience that’s participating. The fact that people not only have that video solution, but also have an audience, is compelling. You mentioned earlier that you can use a regular search engine to find something within the catalogue of videos, and it’s really those two sides that drive each other. First, you have someone who wants to upload a video, and they want to get in front of the largest audience, and that’s what YouTube provides. On the other side, when someone’s searching for a video, they want to go where the most video exists, so they end up coming to YouTube. Those two sides complement each other and drive this natural network effect.

The site also allows for a more direct interaction between established artists and their audience. I saw an interview recently with Paul Thomas Anderson, the director of There Will Be Blood, and he mentioned that when he was editing the movie, he was able to put up a trailer without any interference from the studio. He said, “There wasn’t anything like YouTube when I started out.”
Yeah, not only the amateurs, but also professional creators realise that they have a new test-ground for trying out ideas. It is a different medium, where it’s not a full length show or a movie. It’s these short clips that you’re trying to tell a story with. You’re trying to get a reaction in a short amount of time, and it’s a different way of delivering the message. The users themselves are learning how to tell their stories, but we’re just at the tip of the iceberg, in terms of people having the devices, the tools and the understanding of how to put a great story together using video. Over the next few years the quality is only going to get better and better.

Is it impossible to properly regulate content on YouTube, just because the site is so vast?
You know, I think we’ve been at the forefront of dealing with the problem of having such a huge volume of content uploaded each day. In terms of copyright infringing material, one of the first things we’ve done is build technology enabling our partners – or anyone with content that they own – to make decisions. It gives the maximum choice of how they want their content to be used. They can remove it from the site. But what we’ve seen from the majority of people using our tools is that they identify and claim this material, and view it as promotional. Many of our partners are not only claiming but also adding material to the site, and they see it help their ratings on TV, or driving CD sales. The people interacting with this material are their biggest fans; they want to support and foster that. We’re also giving them more options to monetise this material when they identify it, so it’s a new revenue source.

There’s been considerable controversy here about school kids uploading videos of themselves fighting. Are you concerned about undesirable content slipping through the net?
First of all, we’re really reactive to that type of content, and we’ve made it clear from day one what our site’s about with our community guidelines. Because we’ve been able to build a community around that, they want to protect what they’ve created. They’re able to flag content that shouldn’t be up there for any reason, whether it’s violent or pornographic or hateful. They flag it and we remove it within minutes. We’re able to leverage the power of millions of people around the world to scale the amount of video content that we receive. But I think with any service, and the internet in general – probably especially in our case, because we’re so large and visible – you hear the good and the bad. The majority of the stuff that’s happening on our site is great, it’s only a small number of things that surface to attention which are negative. And when we find out about them, we take care of them.
Although it’s an argument I certainly don’t believe, there are some people who contend that by providing a forum for people to upload whatever they like, YouTube somehow encourages violence.
There are always going to be people who try to take advantage of technology in that way, but the tools are in place to control that. The community is taking the right steps and giving appropriate reactions, and also participating in a positive way, in that the majority of people are actually using it to spread their own ideas and create a dialogue. A globalised dialogue that hasn’t existed before.
In terms of copyrighted material, did the record companies approach you at one point and say that a mutually satisfying solution had to be found?
Well, we reached out to them. Obviously, when we started the site, we didn’t realise what we were getting into. We thought people would want to share their video clips in the same way they did photos. Even though that’s the majority of the content that we still deal with, we didn’t realise all these opportunities with regard to helping traditional media get a new audience. So along the way, as we saw our growth start to accelerate, we knew there was an opportunity to go out there and educate people about the potential that existed in this new environment. We had to come up with a solution on a big scale that would last for a long time, so we have deals with all the major record labels, and we’re working with publishers around the world to try and unify this market.
Is there direct revenue for the record companies or do they just view it as a promotional tool?
They get revenue from the advertising. It’s significant, and it’s a new market for them, so it adds to the bottom line. Also, it adds to the advertising market for us, which I think will grow. But on the other side, I think we add just as much value in terms of promotion. We’ve also started working with them to add music links to the video pages, to direct people to where they can download music from iTunes or Amazon.
Aside from the official promotional videos, music fans also post footage from live performances. Would you be concerned that one of the record companies might decide at some point that they haven’t been adequately compensated for those clips?
Well, there are tools. They have the ability to claim all that content or remove it; it’s really their choice. But like I said, the majority of the partners that we’re working with actually embrace that, not only because it’s an additional revenue source, but they’re embracing the fans and the medium.
Did you meet Gordon Brown at the Zeitgeist conference?
I didn’t get a chance to say hi but I did hear his speech.
Would you say you’re a politically engaged person generally?
People sometimes put a box around YouTube and say it’s about a certain type of content, like funny videos or what have you. But you now have Gordon Brown taking questions from people on YouTube. So it’s pretty broad and interesting. People don’t always see that angle, but the political dialogue has been tremendous. It’s opened people’s eyes to issues and given them a chance to discuss them, not only amongst themselves, but also with the candidates. During the US primaries, I think we’ve seen a tremendous reaction to the younger voters’ participation. I hope they’re more aware to some extent because of YouTube.
Would you like to see a Democrat in the White House after the next election?
I think Obama has a good shot. With him in particular, his background is so diverse. For him to have a chance to become the President of the United States I think represents what America’s all about.
US senator Joe Lieberman complained recently about YouTube not doing enough to remove videos posted by terrorist organisations. What was your reaction to that?
Well, we responded to it. We posted a blog on our site responding to his request, and we reviewed the videos that he sent to us. Some of them were violent and violated our terms of use, and we took them down. But the majority of them were just a different point of view, I guess you could say. Some videos on our site, although they may be not be violent or hateful, they might be controversial, because people are expressing their own views. We’re not going to take them down if we feel you need to have a dialogue around something.
Is it tricky to maintain the balance between allowing freedom of speech whilst also ensuring that no one goes too far?
Yeah, it’s difficult. We’re operating with a global community, and we support free speech, but we have these community guidelines. We’re also trying to balance that against cultural differences between countries and local law. So, with any video that’s brought to our attention, we look at those things to make a decision on what way to act. You’re talking about hundreds of thousands of videos being uploaded on a daily basis, so it’s a tremendous challenge for us, but we feel like we set the correct policies and have the correct tools to be able to manage it.
What did you think of the US military banning soldiers from using the site?
It’s unfortunate. We don’t really know the real reasons, initially they said it was bandwidth. I joked around, saying, ‘They invented the internet, so what’s the problem?’
Was it surprising though?
I don’t know… maybe. It’s unfortunate because I think there are a lot of soldiers abroad who would share their experiences with their families, and vice versa.
YouTube has been blocked in certain countries. Is there a dialogue with the authorities in those territories?
Yeah, there are issues we are dealing with around cultural differences and local law. We’re trying to manage all of it. We talk to all of them, and explain what YouTube is about and the tools that we can provide. We work closely with them to help them use the site. There are countries where there is an outright ban, and there are countries where only certain videos are blocked. We have the flexibility to do that as well. Even though a particular country might find a video offensive, we don’t uphold that around the rest of the world. You may have to block videos just for particular countries.
You attended the last two meetings of the World Economic Forum. Did you meet Bill Gates at either?
Yeah, we were on a panel together the first year. He’s a nice guy. What he’s put back into the world with his Foundation is very impressive to see.
Is philanthropy something you’d like to get involved in at some point?
Yeah, I feel a responsibility to give back, and I realise I’m in a special position. I’m pretty busy just at the moment with YouTube, so who knows how that will evolve.
Have you met the world’s richest man, Warren Buffett?
I met him at a conference in Sun Valley a couple of years ago. He seems really down to earth, really genuine. Someone at his level, you wouldn’t really expect that. I think, in a way, his success is based on just taking it day to day as well. It doesn’t seem like he’s necessarily working to make more and more money, it’s about rising to the next challenge.
Will advertising always be the core revenue stream for YouTube?
I think it will. We stayed away from subscription models and download-only models, because we just felt they were a barrier to entry. If you wanted to build the largest audience you could, you had to allow as many people as possible to participate. When it comes to advertising, Google was a natural fit for us, given that they’ve been so successful on that front.
But has it been a limiting business model? There are regular reports stating that YouTube has yet to become profitable.
I don’t think so. Now that we’re part of Google, it’s not only given us more resources, but also more time to get things right. Because Google has such a great core business, they’re able to support these other products that continue to grow and provide a great user service. They’re not necessarily desperate for us to do something dramatic that may change what the site is all about. So in that way we’ve just been testing things, we’ve been getting the systems in place to do them correctly. We’re confident that with the large audience we have, it’s a great opportunity to maximise the revenue from advertising.
What do you see as the future for YouTube?
I still think that for the internet – not just video – there’s a great potential for people to build more services. There are a lot more problems that need to be worked on, and I think we’ll see the results of that in years to come. Who knows where it’s all going to end up? In the video space, we think that it’s going to become a common experience across websites. What drives us is knowing that we’re not going to be the only video site out there, and being aware that we need to make things better for our community.

Photos Cathal Dawson