In case you missed it, the second edition of YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture is now out in bookstores everywhere, with its snazzy new red cover!

Here is the Preface to the second edition:

The original aim of this book was, as we wrote in the Preface, ‘to work through some of the often competing ideas about just what YouTube is, and what it might or might not turn out to be for’. We completed the study that it was based on a full decade ago in 2007, with the book manuscript being delivered a few months later in early 2008.

YouTube has transformed significantly in the past ten years. It has of course continued to grow at dizzying rates, but it has also changed in terms of its business model, its interface and features, its cultural role, and the extent to which it regulates content and behaviour. It has evolved from a disruptive ‘Web 2.0’ startup to one of the most powerful platforms in a digital media environment that is dominated by them; and those early competing ideas about what it was, and what it was ‘for’, while far from settled, are now more widely understood. Given the scope of change since we completed the original manuscript, the project of preparing a second edition might at first glance seem quite daunting. But, despite these signifi- cant transformations of the platform, we believe that many of our original findings and arguments have stood the test of time quite well.

First, we stand by our original core argument that YouTube’s value – what it had turned out to be ‘for’ so far – was ‘co-created by YouTube Inc., now owned by Google, the users who upload content to the website, and the audiences who engage around that content’. The content contributors even back then were already a diverse group – ‘from large media producers and rights-owners such as television stations, sports companies, and major advertisers, to small- to-medium enterprises looking for cheap distribution or alternatives to mainstream broadcast systems, cultural institutions, artists, activists, media literate fans, non-professional and amateur media producers’. Each of these participants, we argued, approached YouTube ‘with their own purposes and aims and collectively [shaped] YouTube as a dynamic cultural system’. This is why we said then, and continue to say now, that YouTube was co-created by diverse and multiple interests.

We also said that YouTube was a site of participatory culture – and, as we emphasize even more strongly in this edition, participatory culture is YouTube’s core business. The cultural logics of community, openness, and authenticity are embedded in the YouTube platform and brand at all scales of commerciality, from everyday documentation through to those star YouTubers with six-figure incomes, billions of views and millions of subscribers. However, it is also true that the culture of YouTube – its structure of feeling, to borrow from Raymond Williams – has co-evolved with its growth in scale and commercial maturity. It is our task to tell that story of change over time, as well as to interrogate the emergent politics and contradictions of commercially mediated participatory cultures that the story of YouTube represents so clearly.

Our overall aim in preparing this second edition, then, was to achieve a revised and updated account of the platform, without overwriting the historical record – and certainly without writing an entirely new book. For the most part, we have taken a comparative and additive approach – preserving, updating, and supplementing the original material – but we have tried to be explicit and detailed where possible about how and with what impacts the platform has changed over time. Accordingly, throughout the book we explicitly and reflexively refer to factual statements and arguments that we made in the first edition, and discuss how the scale, characteristics and significance of the phenomena they refer to have changed.

This comparative and additive approach is of particular importance in Chapter 3, ‘YouTube’s Popular Culture’, which leans heavily on the methods and findings of our original (and non-replicable) content analysis of YouTube’s most popular videos, which relied on and critically reflected on the plat- form’s metrics for measuring and representing popularity as they were in 2007. Rather than overwriting that work, we have framed the methods and findings historically, and updated some of the examples. We also show how some of contemporary YouTube’s most distinctive and embedded cultural forms, practices, and genres – from vlogging to gameplay and unboxing videos – have emerged from the dynamics of its early popular culture. Early YouTube’s popular culture was in turn generated out of the interactions among the affordances and business model of the platform, the activities and interests of content creators, the broader vernacular cultures of the Internet, and the consumption and engagement practices of audiences.

Throughout the book, we have revised the original material for style and tone, as well as updating terminology where it has become dated. For example, you will find fewer references to ‘new media’ and ‘Web 2.0’ than in the first edition, except where they refer back to the dominant discourses of the mid-2000s; similarly, we talk about YouTube mostly as a platform rather than a ‘website’, reflecting the migration to mobile apps and television screens that accounts for so much contemporary YouTube use. We adopt the now-pervasive emic or insider concept of a YouTube ‘community’ rather than talking about YouTube’s ‘social network’. Where appropriate, we talk about content creators and channels, rather than users and user profiles, reflecting changes in the way the platform works and the way its cultural logics have changed. Chapter 2 is now entitled ‘YouTube and the Media’, rather than ‘YouTube and the Mainstream Media’, because it no longer makes sense to situate YouTube as being separate from the ‘mainstream media’. First, YouTube is itself now a dominant media platform in much of the world; second, the broader media environment is now so distributed, digital, multi-platform, and diverse that it would be difficult to say what ‘the mainstream media’ (as opposed to new or digital media) is.

At the back of the first edition of this book we included two additional commissioned essays, one each by Henry Jenkins and John Hartley. They looked outward from our detailed study of YouTube, which was grounded in the contemporary moment of YouTube’s early years, to provide more expansive explorations of the challenges and opportunities that the plat- form represented to some of the central areas of concern in media and cultural studies – past, present, and future. While the new edition does not include these additional materials, we encourage you to revisit them, and we are forever grateful to Henry and John for contributing their distinctive scholarly insights into YouTube’s early cultural significance.