Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside Youtube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination

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 on it is beyond comprehension. Every minute, over 500 hours of footage are uploaded to the site, the equivalent of 82 years of YouTube added a day. That anyone can easily access any minute of this footage-and the trillion minutes more already on YouTube.com-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, told through the very people who created YouTube, the Google engineers and chiefs who took it over, and the fascinating stars to emerge on the platform. It's the story of the birth of a creative economy and an industry run amok. And it's the story of a company that placed blind faith in technology and had to scramble to fix an enormous media service that had spiraled out of control.

Mark Bergen, an award-winning tech reporter at Bloomberg, might know Google better than any other reporter in Silicon Valley, having broken numerous stories about YouTube 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 them.