209. Life in an Attention Economy

Across the world, people watch more than a billion hours of video on YouTube every day. Every minute, more than five hundred additional hours of footage are uploaded to the site, a technical feat unmatched in the history of computing. YouTube invented the attention economy we all live in today, forever changing how people are entertained, informed, and paid online. Everyone knows YouTube. And yet virtually no one knows how it works. In this episode of BIC talks, Mark Bergen, Business and Tech journalist and author of the book, Like, Comment, Subscribe is in conversation with Padmini Ray Murray, researcher and founder of Design Beku; and reveals the riveting, behind-the-scenes account of YouTube's technology and business -how it helped its parent company Google achieve unimaginable power, introduces the narrative told through the people who run YouTube and the famous stars born on its stage. It's the story of a revolution in media and an industry run amok, how a devotion to a simple idea—let everyone broadcast online and make money doing so—unleashed an outrage and addiction machine that spun out of the company's control and forever changed the world. Subscribe to the BIC Talks Podcast on your favourite podcast app! BIC Talks is available everywhere, including iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Castbox, Overcast and Stitcher.