The see-saw revolution

When I started learning to drive a car, I found a good driving instructor, who took me around our block for half an hour everyday in his battered Maruthi. While he was a good instructor by Indian standards, what he did not know and could not teach was how to parallel park. So I went home and Googled ‘parallel parking’ which led me to many YouTube videos showing me different styles of parallel parking.
Three months earlier when I had my first baby, I wanted to find out what was the best way to change his diaper without getting all messy. This time, I instinctively went to YouTube and found hundreds of videos that show me how to change a diaper. And when I wanted to write an article about net neutrality, I again went to YouTube, where I found videos explaining the principle of net neutrality and hundreds of personal video blogs of laymen expressing their views about the contentious topic. Though, I never gave it a second thought, when I was told that YouTube is the second biggest search engine, it gave me a pause and after a little poking around the web, it dawned on me that it is right and people like me who are going to the video sharing site to learn things like changing diapers, making iPhone apps, cooking chicken Biryani, checking game play in Call of Duty are pushing YouTube’s status to being the second largest search engine in the world.
YouTube, the video-sharing site started in 2005 above a pizzeria by three former PayPal workers has become an integral part of online lives and has become the go-to site for online search. Though it can be used for only video searches within five years of inception it has reached the point where for every 11 searches on the internet, 8 are done on Google’s engines, and 3 are done on YouTube’s. This leaves Yahoo and Microsoft far behind YouTube. Google keeps mum about YouTube’s status as the second largest search engine but is happy with YouTube’s meteoric rise, because it bought YouTube in 2006, and because YouTube is one of the main reasons that Google as a whole, has passed 10 billions searches per month. Ask the modest co-founder of YouTube Chad Hurley and he would only say “I just wanted to create something that I would use and others would find useful too”.
In India, this is not much more different. According to comScore, the online marketing survey agency, Google sites accounts for around 81% of searches done in India and around 30% of those searches come from YouTube. From a survey done in January 2011,comScore also found out that 7 out of 10 Indian web users watch online video in a month. With 30 million Indians watching online video, mostly on YouTube, that is 72% of Indians who come online every month. While this is still less than the 85% viewing in countries like USA, industry watchers predict that exponential growth of broadband will push for more online video viewing and consequently will grow YouTube as a major search engine the world over and particularly in markets like India and Brazil which have tremendous growth opportunities. Joe Nguyen of comScore says “online video viewing is quickly becoming a central activity for Internet users in India...as broadband penetration continues to increase, we expect to see online video continue to grow”. And needless to say the growth is being led by YouTube.
Ask Kalyan, the 36 year old engineer about what he goes to YouTube for and he says cricket matches. Ask Sphoorthy, the 21 year old medicine student and she says movie trailers. Ask Shyam, the 58 year old activist and he says video blogs. For the 10 year old Rani it is finding solutions to her maths problems. For an IT developer like Jai it is about finding online Java tutorials.
Exactly this divergence of being all things to all the people is what is pushing YouTube to be what TV has always aspired to be. YouTube is an education tool, a blogging tool, an encyclopedia, and more than anything, an entertainment tool as evidenced by the meteoric rise of YouTube starts like Justin Bieber. What radio was to our grandfather’s generation, and TV was to our father’s, YouTube is to our generation.