Looking back, the original idea behind YouTube seems almost quaint. The mythic founding story goes like this: in January of 2005, two PayPal employees, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, were at a party. People were taking photos and videos on their digital cameras. Sharing photos was easy, sharing video was anything but. “People have different video types, video codecs they have to download, video software,” Chen said on Charlie Rose in 2006. He and Hurley had a sense that as digital cameras and cameraphones became ubiquitous, more people were going to want to share their footage. “We tried to simplify the process, to make it as easy as possible to share these videos online.” By the end of the year, their simple platform was already a huge hit.Fast forward to today, the 20th anniversary of the first-ever YouTube video upload, and the numbers have become so big they’re basically meaningless. Three and a half billion people watch YouTube every month, according to one study. Google’s earnings show it brought in about $36 billion in ad revenue alone last year. YouTube gets 50 percent more viewership than Netflix, and about as much as Disney, Prime Video, Peacock, and Paramount Plus combined — and that only counts people watching YouTube on their TVs. YouTube is by most measurements the second most popular search engine on the internet (after Google), and the second most popular social network (after Facebook). It’s the most popular service for both music and podcast listening. It’s the second most popular page on Wikipedia, for some reason. It’s for cat videos and Oscar winners. YouTube knows no bounds.Ahead of the 20th anniversary, I talked to a number of people inside YouTube about the state of the platform. I asked them all a variant of the same question: what is YouTube? It’s not just a video-sharing platform anymore. It’s podcasts and videos and music and games and group chats and a thousand other things. What has YouTube become? And what’s the plan going forward?Over and over, I heard the same thing: YouTube is more complicated and more diffuse than ever, and it’s definitely no longer a singular platform. But the idea at the core of the thing hasn’t changed at all. “The secret of YouTube was never really a secret”“The secret of YouTube was never really a secret,” said Scott Silver, a product and engineering leader at YouTube who has been at Google since the days of Google Video. (Google Video, you definitely don’t need to remember, was Google’s attempt to build a video-sharing platform before it gave up and bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006.) “It’s just that if there’s a giant collection of videos somewhere, and you figure out which ones to show people, and then they watch them, and you’re able to pay the people who make that collection of videos to make more of them, then there’s more stuff to choose from. It compounds on itself.”That’s the grand unified theory of YouTube, right there, and it has been compounding on itself for two decades. It has made YouTube enormous, and enormously powerful. But the job’s not done: there are always new formats, new content types, and new devices to reckon with. YouTube’s ambitions are only getting bigger, too — the company clearly aspires to be the size of the entertainment industry, or maybe even be the entertainment industry. That is going to require history’s largest video collection to get much, much larger.The many faces of YouTubeWhen I ask Brian Albert, a managing director on YouTube’s advertising team, to explain YouTube to me the way he explains it to clients, he breaks the platform into three separate categories. There’s streaming, the high-end stuff that competes with Netflix and the rest. There’s also social video, in YouTube’s case mostly meaning Shorts, up against TikTok and Reels. And there’s what Albert calls “straight online video,” the kind of creator-led mid- and long-form video you really only find on YouTube. “We have competitors across the board,” Albert said, “but there’s no single competitor who plays in each of those three lanes.”Albert delineates things this way because that’s how advertisers think about video. YouTube’s clients have budgets, and those budgets have categories — over the years, as YouTube has become a more sophisticated business, it has tried to convince advertisers of the unique value of YouTube but also to give them a place to put the dollars earmarked for live sports or prestige TV. The goal is to get advertisers in the door with products they already know, and then try to sell them on everything else. “Advertisers for a while now have been buying us like TV or like digital video,” said Tara Walpert Levy, YouTube’s vice president for the Americas. “Now they’re leaning in much more heavily on things like commerce or brand deals.” (YouTube, of course, gets a cut whenever you buy something through a shop or a sponsored video.) Advertisers have long been wary of putting too much emphasis on one thing, preferring to spread their spend around. YouTube is increasingly making the argument that it’s possible to hit all your budgets and all your target markets, all on one platform.If you look at YouTube as a series of products reverse-engineered from advertising budgets, the company’s many offerings start to make a kind of sense. Shorts look like TikToks and Reels because that’s what people like to watch, but also because creative agencies are already used to making short, vertical video ads. YouTube spent billions on NFL Sunday Ticket, and made a whole cable-replacement bundle in YouTube TV, to make pivoting from TV ads to digital ads as simple as possible. YouTube builds huge packages around awards shows, March Madness, and other big cultural moments, because that’s what the money is earmarked for.The simplest way to understand YouTube is as an insatiable content collector, constantly searching for anything that smells like time spentUltimately, though, the simplest way to understand YouTube is as an insatiable content collector, constantly searching for anything that smells like time spent. YouTube knows that its whole system — the sharp recommendation algorithm, the creator tools, the vast swaths of money — only works if it ultimately leads to someone creating the exact right thing to recommend to you every time you open the app. That’s one reason it pays creators better than other social platforms; it knows better than most that incentivizing them to make content makes the whole thing go. That’s why YouTube has spent so much time, money, and energy hoovering up every kind of content imaginable. YouTube was built on the back of pirated TV — you could argue the SNL sketch “Lazy Sunday” was the first viral YouTube video, and its huge popularity led to the billion-dollar Viacom lawsuit that briefly threatened to kill YouTube entirely, but ultimately both established it as a place safely full of copyright theft and taught YouTube the value of making deals. For years, YouTube tried to create its own Emmy-worthy shows and Oscar-winning movies, before eventually developing things like Primetime Channels that brought other streaming services onto the platform. (Now we have companies like Warner Bros. just dumping full movies onto YouTube, hoping they’ll get picked up by the algorithm.) The cable-like deals struck for YouTube TV bring all-important live events onto YouTube. By investing in podcasts and YouTube Music, YouTube turned itself into an audio-friendly service too. (YouTube Music is substantially smaller than Spotify or Apple Music, but if you include people consuming music on YouTube it’s the biggest music platform by a mile.) The goal is all the same: anytime you want content of any kind, you’ll open YouTube. I get the sense YouTube would happily start printing books if it thought people still liked to read.You really can’t overstate the importance of the sheer tonnage of YouTube, when you’re looking at why it has worked. Consider a counterexample: Netflix, which has somewhere in the range of 6,500 titles available. Total. “Netflix might have the algorithm knowledge of ‘we’ve seen what you like, and we can tell you what the next perfect movie would be for you,’” Pablo Lucio Paredes, head of engineering and data at the streaming guide company Reelgood, told me last year. “But does Netflix have that actual movie?” YouTube may not have Stranger Things (at least not officially), but it has a few billion other things you might like. And over the last 20 years, it has also managed to convince a lot of people that they’d rather watch MrBeast than the scrappy kids in Hawkins, Indiana.That’s content-biz, babyThere’s plenty of existing content left for YouTube to bring onto the platform, but the way YouTube wins is by getting creators to create. The company has always understood that its homegrown talent is its greatest asset. But every YouTuber eventually feels the platform’s constant desire for more content; if you don’t feed the algorithm, and tap into every new trend and format that bubbles up across the ecosystem, you might get left behind. YouTube seems to mint new creators faster than it burns them out, but that might not be true forever. And as the platform continues to grow, it’s harder and harder for new creators to find a big audience. Eventually, YouTube risks becoming too big for its own good.YouTube is betting on AI to solve a lot of its problems. The company has spent the last couple of years putting AI to work on practically every part of the creator experience, from replying to comments to coming up with ideas to making wholly generated videos. The company is also extremely bullish on using AI to automatically dub videos into other languages. If it all works, it could increase the YouTube library — and the platform’s chance of always having the right video to show you — like nothing ever has. If it doesn’t work, though, it could poison the well with AI slop and turn YouTube into a platform chock-full of content no one wants. One of these fates appears to be waiting for just about every content maker on the planet. The other ultra-ambitious plan for increasing content is coming in video games. Years ago, YouTube tried to compete directly with Twitch as a game-streaming platform, via a separate app called YouTube Gaming, which didn’t really work. Now gamers use YouTube as a platform for content about games, or just content that only makes sense in a world where everyone plays games. “If you had told me when we were building the gaming app,” said Katherine de León, who leads gaming at YouTube, “that in 2025, one of the biggest gaming creators on YouTube would be a mother of four in Texas who makes Minecraft roleplay videos for girls and women, I would have told you to go home.” She also points to huge hits like Skibidi Toilet as the kind of content that only makes sense when everyone’s a gamer.More recently, YouTube has started to offer what it calls “Playables.” They are essentially mini-games inside of YouTube, and feel a little like what you’d expect to find on Facebook circa the Zynga days. There are what appear to be official versions of Crossy Road and Angry Birds, multiple takes on solitaire and chess; and three identical-looking games called Bubble Pop Star, Bubble Shooter, and Bubble Tower 3D. Each one loads like a mini-app inside YouTube.“It’s consumption and creation, right?”At first glance, Playables make no sense. There are no built-in livestreaming tools or comment threads, no sign at all you’re even on YouTube. But de León makes two arguments in favor of Playables. One is that people like playing games, and that’s enough. They’re good content. But the long-term strategy hinges on games that are their own content-creation machines. “A lot of our top games on YouTube are sandbox games,” she said. “It’s consumption and creation, right?” In Fortnite, Roblox, and elsewhere, players are making content in the games, making content about the games, and making content with the tools of the game. I’m pretty sure Bubble Tower 3D isn’t going to turn into a content machine. So at some point, if you want to be the internet’s great content engine, you just build your own Roblox, right? At this, de León mostly just smiles. She was a game dev for years before coming to Google – her answer is clear. But all she’ll say is, it would definitely make sense. “As a game maker of 17 years, I’m excited about that whole loop,” she said. “You can watch, you can play, you can comment, and you can do it in Shorts, you can do it on YouTube TV, you can do it in a live-streaming channel.” Aping Roblox isn’t easy – just ask everyone who’s ever wasted millions or billions of dollars trying to build a live-service game people love — and it would be YouTube’s biggest structural change yet. But it’s content. So YouTube will try.The everywhere appWhile most of YouTube goes out and tries to corner the content market, the engineering team’s job is to take all of these disparate projects and make them something akin to universally accessible. “It’s one of the things YouTube has excelled at from the very early days,” said John Harding, a VP of engineering at YouTube. “We figure out how to get your media everywhere.” Once upon a time, that meant a web browser on your desktop computer. Now it’s much more than that. “I used to say we were trying to get YouTube on anything with a network connection and a screen,” Harding said. “Now we’re trying to get YouTube on things that don’t have network connections — and don’t have screens.”“Now we’re trying to get YouTube on things that don’t have network connections — and don’t have screens.”In fact, Silver reckons, YouTube might be the Google application that can run on the most devices. “Except maybe Search,” he said, before reconsidering. “But then, you don’t really search on your TV, you don’t really search on your watch. But YouTube has to work on all of those devices, from set-top boxes to TVs to VR headsets to watches to car players. And then, of course, mobile phones and desktops and all those kinds of things.” It’s a hard job no matter what, and much harder when you have to reinvent the wheel on every new device. As much as possible, Silver said, “what we try to do is push stuff into our base platform.” No matter where you load a YouTube video, the goal is to have it run as much identical code as possible. Sometimes features might get developed for one part of the platform — like multi-view on YouTube TV, so people can watch four games at a time — but much of that is then brought back to the overall codebase. The goal, Silver said, is to build things as few times as possible.For 20 years, that’s how it has worked: get all the content, get it everywhere. The “all” and the “everywhere” in that plan have both expanded dramatically since the days of “Me at the zoo” in a desktop browser, but the job is still the job. And while YouTube’s competitors have occasionally beaten it in certain ways, particularly recently — people speak in reverent tones about how well TikTok’s algorithm understands them, and YouTube doesn’t have a capture-and-edit tool nearly as good as Instagram or CapCut — nobody has yet managed to copy the whole system. Get people to make videos; put those videos in front of the right people; pay the people who make the videos so they’ll make more. Somehow nobody else is doing that right. And the bigger YouTube gets, the more money comes into the ecosystem, the faster the flywheel turns.Now, though, YouTube is the established giant and no longer the cool upstart. It has convinced the world that creators are celebrities, that prank videos and documentaries can co-exist, that it is a mainstream entertainment business. As Walpert Levy put it, YouTube has reached the “nobody ever got fired for advertising on YouTube” phase. Now the company has its sights on everything from podcasts to gaming, with ideas about how to make them more YouTube-y. The YouTube-ification of the entertainment business is only just getting started. And it’s all a big bet that you’ll be there, watching, the whole time.See More: