In this New Year address, Tom reflects on YouTube’s rapid evolution in 2007, highlighting how the influx of money—primarily through advertising and the launch of the Partner Program—began to reshape the platform. He discusses the tension between capitalist incentives and the community’s “soul,” noting both the excitement of growth and a nostalgic ambivalence for the pre‑monetization era. Tom critiques YouTube’s communication with creators, questioning whether the Community Council truly represents member interests, and calls for clearer, more transparent leadership in 2008. Throughout, he emphasizes the importance of people connecting with people, the need for diverse, authentic content, and his hope that YouTube will balance profitability with genuine community care.
Chapters
Well, hi, it's Tom. You know, if time flies when you're having fun, I must be having a great time because here's another year that just simply zoomed, zoomed by. And I just thought I'd take a second to thank you all for making 2007 one of the most interesting and productive years of my life in terms of creating new stuff and thinking about new things and learning new things. You know, when you, when you get older, there's a real temptation to feel like you know everything. Just read an article the other day in the New York Times about how the more expert anybody becomes in any subject, the more likely they are to reject new thinking. And this is a tremendous challenge to all of us, particularly as we age in a world where pace of change is dramatically picking up. And so, you know, here on YouTube, it's been an extraordinary year. Just an extraordinary year. I mean, I was just rummaging through and I had saved this Wired magazine from last year, you know, one that I kind of made a funny video about, which, you know, this is the December 2006 edition of Wired saying YouTube grows up. And the funny thing is that if they thought YouTube grew up in 2006, They had no idea of what was gonna happen in 2007, did they? 2007 was really the year that we felt the money start to have an impact on YouTube, isn't it? And, you know, money, I love money. I'm a reformed socialist from the '60s and '70s and a very comfortable capitalist in the sense that I believe that the capitalist system has enabled American society, Western society, and the world to become more prosperous, to incent people to develop more innovation and to create more new things than any economic social system in the history of human civilization. It's not perfect, we know that. There's a tremendous number of problems that come with capitalism, but, you know, it's kind of like, I forget who it was, said about democracy, you know, "It's a lousy system except for all the others," you know. But in 2007, we felt the impact of money on YouTube. We saw that advertising was going to be the way that YouTube was going to legitimize its business from a financial standpoint. Yes, Google bought YouTube in 2006, but in 2007 we really got to see what it was all about. We really got to see how advertising was going to come into play. We saw it first with the with the partners, the very small first group of partners. Then we saw the partnership program open up, and now we see the partnership open— program open to everybody. Not everyone's happy about that. There are parts of it that I think we all look at with some ambivalence and maybe a little bit of nostalgia about what it was like before the money really kicked in. But that's yesterday. The thing that I hope for in 2008 for us on YouTube is that we don't lose what I always have felt to be the soul of this place, which is people connecting with people. And that's not always easy. We're messy creatures, you know? People don't conform very well. To one another's ideas of what we should be, particularly in a place like this where there's, you know, all this anonymity. You know, who are you really? I don't really know you, but I do know you in some ways. It's a challenge for us to maintain a space where we can encourage everyone to be themselves, to allow everyone to be themselves. It takes a pretty thick skin to be here. We know that a lot of people don't feel it's worth it and have left, and that's a, that's a major concern to me. I, I don't feel like YouTube's done a very good job of demonstrating to the community that it cares about the community's well-being. I believe that the people that I've met as a result of being involved in the Community Council do have the community's well-being at heart, but I'm not sure that those people are controlling the decision-making process. I'm not sure that the decisions are always being made in ways that really do send a message to the community about having the members' best interest at heart. So, and all of this is always a balancing act. There's always on this hand and on the other hand. But I hope that in 2008 that YouTube can get a lot better at communicating its real intent clearly, not ambiguously, clearly to the members of the community. I think the establishment of the Community Council was a first step. Only a first step and in some ways a very small first step. But I do think that there is an opportunity for YouTube to demonstrate that it really does think about the community and wants to continue to have a group of people who are not professional content makers. We all want to see different things here, the, the diversity of what's available on YouTube. Is part of what makes it such an incredible place for people to come to and to find, you know, a tremendous amount of entertainment, of enlightenment, of real poignant human contact. I think it's a tremendous step in the integration of human civilization and technology for YouTube to have become what it's become so quickly. But I think that we can't— we can't believe that it's going to just continue to be something special without it being guided by real leadership to guide it in a direction that lets people know that there are people who have their best interest at heart and who understand what it's like to be a member of this community. So I hope you have a great New Year. Thanks so much for making me feel so welcome, so many of you. You've been, you've been just terrific to me, and I appreciate it a great deal, and I really enjoyed getting to know you. And look forward to getting to know more of you even better in 2008. So take care and see you again soon. Bye-bye.
