Category Archives: Rhetorical Mastery

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Surprise! YouTube is Now the Top Television Platform in the U.S.

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What may come as a surprise is that a company known first as an internet gateway is the source of more hours of television viewing than any other provider.

If you have a clear memory of life before 2000 you might expect that television is still about networks, 13 week “seasons” of comedies and dramas, and any number of television “specials,” usually built around a singer or a beloved comedy performer. But that also dates those of us who think in terms of the programming appearing on the standard over-the-air VHF channels 2 through 13.

A lot has changed in the television universe. Most dramatically, top programs have migrated to platforms that have nothing to do with the original idea of “broadcasting,” which means delivering a television signal to an antenna. Obviously, cable providers carry their own networks as well as those who still broadcast. And we now look for content that is mostly “on demand.”  What may come as a surprise is that a company known first as a computer content platform is the source of more hours of television viewing than any other provider. This is according to Nielsen Research data. YouTube, a branch of Alphabet Inc., arose to the top from its origins in Google.

Nielsen Research Data

YouTube takes no single form or point of view. Each user sets the parameters in the algorithms for videos they may watch. My YouTube habits would in no way mirror yours, unless you like pipe organs in the United Kingdom or a bass guitarist with interesting videos on music theory.

The specificity of content the single most significant element of the platform. It has made it possible to search and find content that matches a viewer’s interests. Few of us studying the mass media in the 1970s could have imagined that “television” could be tailored to the quirkiest  interests. It may be as close as we get to democratizing media. As Jacqueline Zote notes in Sprout Social, the average user spends 48 minutes a day watching YouTube. Younger men are a key demographic in the U.S.  And if its possible, there are even more avid viewers in India. Ads appear if viewers use only the free service, but they are a bit less intrusive than on broadcast television. And, mostly, they won’t butcher an extended music performance.

Because there are both private as well as institutional sources of videos (i.e. a single English historian with interesting ideas, as well as legacy broadcasters like BBC News), viewers need to avoid the mistake of thinking of all videos as having equal veracity.  Fools and fantasists often have an inflated view of their talents, and are often all too willing to display them. A viewer needs to choose sources and their motives carefully.

Not only is YouTube a redefinition of what television is, it is also a medium that thrives at least as much on small screens and computers as well as traditional home sets. Its an internet site, but now also a regular program source for television viewers. Maybe “television” is the wrong word since much of YouTube’s content originates on demand, and outside of the traditions and usual pathways used in professional entertainment. Anyone can upload a YouTube video or be a mobile user of the medium. The results range from the local elementary school showing part of its holiday pageant, to German public television with a full documentary on the free but nervous Baltic states bordering Russia. There is no shortage of individual content providers. In addition, public broadcasters and some news organizations release scores of fascinating programs that would be at home on Netflix. They represent the very tip of professionally produced content. At the other end of the spectrum, some YouTubers clearly have little talent for explaining or organizing material. But more than we might guess, many show evidence of mastering the rudiments of writing, lighting, sound, camera usage and editing. Producing a good video is a humbling experience that takes time and a degree of talent.  We are usually not talking about 4K here. But neither are most YouTube videos going to look like your grandfather’s home movies. For example, Katie Steckly offers a primer for novices who want to start their own series.  At last count she has around 300 subscribers.

Providers of content have good reason to complain if they expect their content will provide a significant revenue stream. Even though there are 100 million paying subscribers, it’s hard to get enough views to make money on YouTube. Even a thousand hits on a person’s YouTube site will only make enough cash to buy lunch. On the other hand, opening up video production to nearly any source has lead to some surprisingly good offerings.

On the downside, a universe of discourse nearly as broad as the population means that a lot of misinformation, anti-social content, and other forms of video mischief are sometimes left on the site.

As boomer undergraduates studying media, we thought of the three primary networks as the largest of the American mass media. Even throw away content got huge audiences. We were pretty sure print would be the pathway used by thinkers and innovators to reach audiences with very specific interests. Now the advent of video has turned that world upside down. The best of independent content providers can almost match the slick offerings of a network. Traditional broadcasting and most on-demand platforms—including Google—exist to make money; but YouTube videos are ubiquitous because content providers usually have a strong appetite for the subject that they want to share.

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Is “Feedback” Genuine Listening?

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We should not assume that a group asking for “feedback” is really listening. Listening is a cultivated and individual skill.  Feedback is typically less refined and subject to organizational filters.   

Recently I noticed that the New York Times seems to have stopped publishing letters in its Sunday Magazine and Book Review. Not an earthshaking change maybe. But it began to strike me that this deletion of reader’s opinions was odd when juxtaposed with the paper’s fall-over-backwards requests for feedback after doing something as simple as reporting a missing paper. The single checkmark notification is a nano-second act, yet it provoked a request to know how satisfying or difficult  the experience was. It seemed that their priorities were upside down. Why dismiss reader’s comments while keeping a useless exercise about a simple matter? I suspect this is a kind of irrationality that grows out of an automated system which doesn’t know what matters.  We are on the midst of similar requests for feedback from CX (Customer Service) teams responsible for designing the “customer journey” in retail. They can satisfy themselves by signaling concern for customers without setting up the tools needed to fully follow through. Listening is a demanding intellectual exercise; responding to an set of a-priori questions is not.

It’s worth remembering that the term “feedback” arose as a name for noise or interference produced by an electrical circuit back onto itself. The deafening growl of a public address system is an example. We get a double dose of aural unpleasantness if Uncle Fred gets his karaoke microphone too close to the speakers.

To be sure, I’m an outlier for still expecting a newspaper to be in the driveway each morning. But this simple example suggests a growing trend in how we are asked to interact with agencies, businesses and organizations. Our communications with these entities seems less about the specifics of a response, and more about creating a running tally of stock complements, complaints, or experiences that can be processed into data-driven marketing. “How did we do?” asks the online store. “Did we answer your question?” a tech website wants to know. The answers will only need a simulacrum of listening, without anyone knowing enough to learn much from the answer.

With some exceptions the idea of “customer care” now amounts to the creation of a digital interface between an increasingly impatient live body on one end, and a digital “bot” with a set of closed-option questions on the other. Companies like Bizrate specialize in setting up such systems for clients. But rarely do organizations allow a customer with a specific question to frame their issue in their own way. Speaking broadly, as a culture we are under the paradoxical impression that we need to appear consumer-driven, but we don’t need to hear that much. Surely customer comments can do some good. But we are already so overtaxed with incoming messages that these pre-formed exchanges seem like they hardly matter.

More often than not, the organizations repertoire of a group’s “answers” cannot easily match the particular variables embedded in a question. Hence, no one is really “chatting.” We have all ended up at the top of a phone tree when none of the options seem good. To change metaphors, more than I can count I’ve ended an exchange with a chatbot feeling like I got pushed onto the wrong train. Try dealing with your cable supplier, and you will likely conclude the experience feeling like you ended up going to Duluth rather Dallas.

What is both ingenious and perverse in these end-of-transaction questions is seemingly how much an organization pretends that it is listening. The problem, of course, is that prompts generated by algorithms cost practically nothing to produce. And they may actually yield some data that can satisfy the performance expectations of management. It seems like the marketing department is growing, but the service department has been hollowed out. Odds are that an organization really doesn’t want to hear you on your terms.