The Rise and Fall of the Superfan

During last Tuesday night’s warm-ups, the Brooklyn Nets wore neon T-shirts honoring the man they knew as Jeffrey Gamblero. His dancing, explosive enthusiasm and eclectic outfits had made him something of an unofficial Nets mascot, and an air of sadness had settled on the team after his death a few days before. Gamblero had been a member of that strangest of tribes, the Superfans. Men and women who, while supporting the famous, become famous themselves. Gamblero had become intertwined with the Nets to such an extent that he was part of their identity. And what troubled many was whether his devotion to the team contributed to his death. (...)

The hipster-like aspect of the Gamblero persona included the fact that he appeared to be ironically taking his cues from the classic Superfan archetype, a character that pops up in sporting events all over. The Superfan usually wears “look at me” outfits (wigs, body paint, and outrageous clothes all in team colors) while engaging in ridiculous behavior. There’s even a classic Simpsons episode about the phenomenon, where Homer Simpson briefly finds his true calling as “Dancin’ Homer.”

They’re not universally beloved figures, Superfans, even among their fellow supporters. To some, they’re entertaining distractions. To others, they’re annoying, deserving objects of outright scorn for making the rest of us look bad.

The anger is understandable. The Superfan, after all, is the stereotypical example of one’s fandom, a figure few want to identify with: the shirtless guy wearing body paint in subzero temperatures; the overzealous screaming buffoon; the sports talk radio regular ranting about how “we” are going to run the table and win the championship every season, year after year, until the heat death of the universe, etc.

The truth is that being a fan often requires an unstable combination of ridiculousness and lack of self-consciousness. To be a fan is to be irrational, to act in ways that are unacceptable in other contexts or that completely contradict our everyday selves. Self-conscious types who never dance will boogie victoriously while their team is blowing out rivals. Stoic men’s men who never cry will blubber like babies when their team win a championship.

When we do all of this we usually look stupid. Maybe there’s a cultural need for the Superfan. The Superfan distracts attention, not to mention the camera, away from us and our often regrettable behavior during sporting events. We can look at the Superfan and say “hey at least we’re not that bad.” (...)

Superfans like Clipper Darrell and the New York Jets’ Fireman Ed (who retired his persona as the team’s struggles took their toll on him) though, are mostly regional figures and usually not the most recognizable of their ilk. Maybe the most famous examples of Superfans aren’t anything of the sort. They are celebrity fans mostly in the sense that they are fans of the idea of celebrity, and they target sporting events because they’re among the best places to be seen.

While the two types share a desire for reinvention and attention, this second type is a more disruptive figure whose desire for fame doesn’t come under the cover of “I’m just a passionate fan.” Through the 70s and 80s being a faux-Superfan, a celebrity spectator really, was mostly a way to become a reality TV star back before reality TV existed. They were the pioneers of the photobomb.

by Hunter Felt, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Forbes

The Beatles

My Unhealthy Obsession with Bob Dylan's Christmas Lights

I have mixed feelings about Christmas decorations. Often, I like them. Rarely do I find them inspiring.

I live in Malibu, California. The average version of a decorated yard in my neighborhood looks more or less like an outdoor restaurant courtyard at a four-star hotel. The decorating style is consistent because many of the residents hire the same company to wrap their trees and shrubbery for them. They all look somewhat like this:

So intimidated was I that for many years I never decorated my yard. It seemed too daunting, too expensive. And then, in 2008, the veil was lifted. A Christmas miracle occurred. A new role model appeared before me, and as luck or serendipity would have it, it was the same role model I used to turn to for creative and lifestyle advice as a teenager.

I speak now of the first time I noticed that Bob Dylan had wedged a small, decidedly uneven, single strand of Christmas lights into the hedge in front of his estate.

It's possible that they were there before 2008. I'm embarrassed to say that before then I wasn't really paying attention. But it also makes sense that this was the very beginning, since he released his one and (so far) only Christmas album, Christmas in the Heart, in 2009.

Here is the earliest known photo I took of Mr. Dylan's holiday oeuvre.

I was immediately taken by his distinctive approach to decorating. Much the way he forged his own path in music, he exhibited an independence of style significantly different than the other homes in the area.

If a professional decorating staff was enlisted, their work was subtle to the point of being invisible, deeply disguised by a faux-naïve approach that recalls Matisse or Chagall. The string of lights seemed to say, "We have been casually tossed into this hedge by someone in a hurry." But of course, this was no randomly displayed, haphazardly arranged, string of colored bulbs. What we had here was the work of Bob Dylan: prolific poet and songwriter, painter, filmmaker, paterfamilias to a whole generation of creative offspring, gate welder, patron of Christmas, born-again Christian and born-again Jew, seer, genius.

So I returned the following year, in 2009, to once again stare at the ever more erratically shaped curvilinear lines.

Having grown up in a world where nothing Bob Dylan has ever done is considered too small to merit serious consideration and scrutiny, this was the year I began to wonder if these lights contained a deeper meaning. Using Christmas lights as a medium, was there something beneath the surface that Mr. Dylan was trying to tell us?

I decided to embark on a multi-year quest. My goal: to contribute to the existing body of knowledge about this legendary artist. Thus did I return, season after season, much like the holidays themselves, as I sought to uncover the subtext behind these deceptively simple annual statements.

The serious student of Mr. Dylan will not be surprised to learn that careful examination did indeed reveal many hidden layers. What first appeared random was, in fact, the complete opposite.

by Merrill Markoe, Vice |  Read more:

Images: Merrill Markoe

Understanding “New Power”

We all sense that power is shifting in the world. We see increasing political protest, a crisis in representation and governance, and upstart businesses upending traditional industries. But the nature of this shift tends to be either wildly romanticized or dangerously underestimated.

There are those who cherish giddy visions of a new techno-utopia in which increased connectivity yields instant democratization and prosperity. The corporate and bureaucratic giants will be felled and the crowds coronated, each of us wearing our own 3D-printed crown. There are also those who have seen this all before. Things aren’t really changing that much, they say. Twitter supposedly toppled a dictator in Egypt, but another simply popped up in his place. We gush over the latest sharing-economy start-up, but the most powerful companies and people seem only to get more powerful.

Both views are wrong. They confine us to a narrow debate about technology in which either everything is changing or nothing is. In reality, a much more interesting and complex transformation is just beginning, one driven by a growing tension between two distinct forces: old power and new power.

Old power works like a currency. It is held by few. Once gained, it is jealously guarded, and the powerful have a substantial store of it to spend. It is closed, inaccessible, and leader-driven. It downloads, and it captures.

New power operates differently, like a current. It is made by many. It is open, participatory, and peer-driven. It uploads, and it distributes. Like water or electricity, it’s most forceful when it surges. The goal with new power is not to hoard it but to channel it.

The battle and the balancing between old and new power will be a defining feature of society and business in the coming years. In this article, we lay out a simple framework for understanding the underlying dynamics at work and how power is really shifting: who has it, how it is distributed, and where it is heading.

by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms, HBR | Read more:
Image: uncredited

[ed. My weakness]
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Unhappy Truckers and Other Algorithmic Problems

When Bob Santilli, a senior project manager at UPS, was invited in 2009 to his daughter’s fifth grade class on Career Day, he struggled with how to describe exactly what he did for a living. Eventually, he decided he would show the class a travel optimization problem of the kind he worked on, and impress them with how fun and complex it was. The challenge was to choose the most efficient route among six different stops, in a typical suburban-errands itinerary. The class devised their respective routes, then began picking them over. But one girl thought past the question of efficiency. “She says, my mom would never go to the store and buy perishable things—she didn’t use the word perishable, I did—and leave it in the car the whole day at work,” Santilli tells me.

Her comment reflects a basic truth about the math that runs underneath the surface of nearly every modern transportation system, from bike-share rebalancing to airline crew scheduling to grocery delivery services. Modeling a simplified version of a transportation problem presents one set of challenges (and they can be significant). But modeling the real world, with constraints like melting ice cream and idiosyncratic human behavior, is often where the real challenge lies. As mathematicians, operations research specialists, and corporate executives set out to mathematize and optimize the transportation networks that interconnect our modern world, they are re-discovering some of our most human quirks and capabilities. They are finding that their job is as much to discover the world, as it is to change it.

The problem that Santilli posed to his daughter’s class is known as a traveling salesman problem. Algorithms solving this problem are among the most important and most commonly implemented in the transportation industry. Generally speaking, the traveling salesman problem asks: Given a list of stops, what is the most time-efficient way for a salesman to make all those stops? In 1962, for example, a Procter and Gamble advertisement tasked readers with such a challenge: To help “Toody and Muldoon,” co-stars of the Emmy-award-winning television show Car 54, Where Are You?, devise a 33-city trip across the continental United States. “You should plan a route for them from location to location,” went the instructions, “which will result in the shortest total mileage from Chicago, Illinois, back to Chicago, Illinois.”

A mathematician claimed the prize, and a regal $10,000. But the contest organizers could only verify that his solution was the shortest of those submitted, and not that it was the shortest possible route. That’s because solving a 33-city problem by calculating every route individually would require 28 trillion years—on the Department of Energy’s 129,000-core supercomputer Roadrunner (which is among the world’s fastest clusters). It’s for this reason that William J. Cook, in his book In Pursuit of the Traveling Salesman, calls the traveling salesman problem “the focal point of a larger debate on the nature of complexity and possible limits to human knowledge.” Its defining characteristic is how quickly the complexity scales. A six-city tour has only 720 possible paths, while a 20-city tour has—by Cook’s quick calculations on his Mac—more than 100 quadrillion possible paths.

There are answers to some traveling salesman problems. Cook himself has produced an iPhone app that will crack 100 cities, using relaxed linear programming and other algorithmic techniques. And every few years or so, teams armed with sophisticated hardware and programming approaches set the bar higher. In 2006, for example, an optimal tour was produced by a team led by Cook for a 85,900-city tour. It did not, of course, given the computing constraints mentioned above, involve checking each route individually. “There is no hope to actually list all the road trips between New York and Los Angeles,” he says. Instead, almost all of the computation went into proving that there is no tour shorter than the one his team found. In essence, there is an answer, but there is not a solution. “By solution,” writes Cook, “we mean an algorithm, that is a step-by-step recipe for producing an optimal tour for any example we may now throw at it.”

And that solution may never come. The traveling salesman problem is at the heart of an ongoing question—the question—in computer science: whether or not P equals NP. As summarized with blunt elegance by MIT’s news office, “roughly speaking, P is a set of relatively easy problems, NP is a set of incredibly hard problems, and if they’re equal, then a large number of computer science problems that seem to be incredibly hard are actually relatively easy.” The Clay Mathematics Institute offers a $1 million reward to a meta-problem hovering like a mothership over the Car 54 challenge and its ilk: proving that P does or does not equal NP.

By now it should be clear that we are not talking just about the routing needs of salesmen, for even the most trenchant of regional reps does not think about hitting 90,000 far-flung burghs on a call. But the Traveling Salesman Problem, and its intellectual cousins, are far from theoretical; indeed, they are at the invisible heart of our transportation networks. Every time you want to go somewhere, or you want something to get to you, the chances are someone is thinking at that very moment how to make that process more efficient. We are all of us traveling salesmen.

by Tom Vanderbilt, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Peter and Maria Hoey

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John Cameron Mitchell on "Hedwig and the Angry Inch"

[ed. A friend and I were talking movies the other day and he mentioned that he hadn't seen Hedwig and the Angry Inch. By coincidence, this interview with John Cameron Mitchell (who wrote, directed and starred in the movie) came up on my YouTube scroll just a couple days later. Great interview (and it sounds like a sequel is in the works). If you haven't seen Hedwig, you have to! Such a wonderfully conceived and sympathetic character. (The music alone is worth it - see last link below). A favorite.]

Tear Me Down

Wicked Little Town

Angry Inch

Full Album

One Year Later: The Wolf of Wall Street 
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[ed. Mostly just by muddling along between planned and unplanned life events.]

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NY Times: Prosecute Torturers and Their Bosses

[ed. About time. Actually, way past time.]

Since the day President Obama took office, he has failed to bring to justice anyone responsible for the torture of terrorism suspects — an official government program conceived and carried out in the years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

He did allow his Justice Department to investigate the C.I.A.'s destruction of videotapes of torture sessions and those who may have gone beyond the torture techniques authorized by President George W. Bush. But the investigation did not lead to any charges being filed, or even any accounting of why they were not filed.

Mr. Obama has said multiple times that “we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” as though the two were incompatible. They are not. The nation cannot move forward in any meaningful way without coming to terms, legally and morally, with the abhorrent acts that were authorized, given a false patina of legality, and committed by American men and women from the highest levels of government on down. (...)

The American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights Watch are to give Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. a letter Monday calling for appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate what appears increasingly to be “a vast criminal conspiracy, under color of law, to commit torture and other serious crimes.

The question everyone will want answered, of course, is: Who should be held accountable? That will depend on what an investigation finds, and as hard as it is to imagine Mr. Obama having the political courage to order a new investigation, it is harder to imagine a criminal probe of the actions of a former president.

But any credible investigation should include former Vice President Dick Cheney; Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, David Addington; the former C.I.A. director George Tenet; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, the Office of Legal Counsel lawyers who drafted what became known as the torture memos. There are many more names that could be considered, including Jose Rodriguez Jr., the C.I.A. official who ordered the destruction of the videotapes; the psychologists who devised the torture regimen; and the C.I.A. employees who carried out that regimen. (...)

Starting a criminal investigation is not about payback; it is about ensuring that this never happens again and regaining the moral credibility to rebuke torture by other governments. Because of the Senate’s report, we now know the distance officials in the executive branch went to rationalize, and conceal, the crimes they wanted to commit. The question is whether the nation will stand by and allow the perpetrators of torture to have perpetual immunity for their actions.

by Editors, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Win McNamee/Getty Images

Beast Quake 2.0

[ed. They're calling it Beast Quake 2.0. Is there a more punishing runner than Marshawn Lynch? (here giving one of his trademark in-depth, post-game interviews). See also: The Sound and the Fury: The Original Beast Quake. Also note: Ricardo Lockette (83) goes completely across the field and back to make four blocks.]

See also: A Marshawn Kind of Way

John Bennett Fitts - Arroyo Seco no. 6
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James Blair, National Geographic, London 1966. Women use compact mirrors to catch sight of the queen.
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The Year of Outrage

Following the news in 2014 is a bit like flying a kite in flat country during tornado season. Every so often, a whirlwind of outrage touches down, sowing destruction and chaos before disappearing into the sky.

These conditions are hardly new. Over the past decade or so, outrage has become the default mode for politicians, pundits, critics and, with the rise of social media, the rest of us. When something outrageous happens—when a posh London block installs anti-homeless spikes, or when Khloé Kardashian wears a Native American headdress, or, for that matter, when we read the horrifying details in the Senate’s torture report—it’s easy to anticipate the cycle that follows: anger, sarcasm, recrimination, piling on; defenses and counterattacks; anger at the anger, disdain for the outraged; sometimes, an apology … and on to the next. Twitter and Facebook make it easier than ever to participate from home. And the same cycle occurs regardless of the gravity of the offense, which can make each outrage feel forgettable, replaceable. The bottomlessness of our rage has a numbing effect.

This desensitization makes it tough to clock exactly how modern outrage functions. Is it as awful as it sometimes feels? More useful than it might seem? Should we be rending our garments about our constant rending of garments? Or should we embrace the new responsiveness of the social and hypersensitive Web?

And so—in an effort to answer these and other questions—we resolved to keep track of what people got outraged about every day of 2014. Since January, a phalanx of editors, writers, and interns has been scanning the horizons for funnels of fury. They used a Google doc and a bot that reminded us about the project any time someone used the word outrage on IM. The rage-a-day calendar above contains the fruits of their labor: a comprehensive listing of what was outrageous and whom it outraged, for every single day of the year.

The results, we think, are illuminating. People were upset about TV stars and wheelchairs and lattes and racism and war. Some days, people were upset about Slate. (Other days, we caught the outrage current and rode it a ways ourselves, as Jordan Weissmann details below.) Though it can be jarring to see something as nation-shaking as Ferguson alongside something as trifling as the cover of a magazine, it’s fascinating to look at how our collective responses skipped from the serious to the picayune without much modulation in pitch. So please explore the calendar above. Vote on which outrages still outrage you, and which you can’t believe anyone ever cared about. And read the thoughtful essays below, each of which examines some aspect of outrage culture, and explore the way it shapes our world.

by Julia Turner, Slate |  Read more:

Image: Interactive by Allison Benedikt, Chris Kirk, and Dan Kois. Art by Holly Allen, Juliana Jimenez, Derreck Johnson, Lisa Larson-Walker, Natalie Mattews-Ramo, Vivian Selbo, and Ellie Skrzat

10.Deep 2014 Holiday Delivery 2 Lookbook
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Why the Sony Hack is Unlikely to be the Work of North Korea.

Everyone seems to be eager to pin the blame for the Sony hack on North Korea. However, I think it’s unlikely. Here's why:

1. The broken English looks deliberately bad and doesn’t exhibit any of the classic comprehension mistakes you actually expect to see in “Konglish”. i.e it reads to me like an English speaker pretending to be bad at writing English.

2. The fact that the code was written on a PC with Korean locale & language actually makes it less likely to be North Korea. Not least because they don’t speak traditional “Korean” in North Korea, they speak their own dialect and traditional Korean is forbidden. This is one of the key things that has made communication with North Korean refugees difficult. I would find the presence of Chinese far more plausible.See here – http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/30/world/asia/30iht-dialect.2644361.html?_r=0
here – http://www.nknews.org/2014/08/north-korean-dialect-as-a-soviet-russian-translation/
and here – http://www.voanews.com/content/a-13-2009-03-16-voa49-68727402/409810.html

This change in language is also most pronounced when it comes to special words, such as technical terms. That’s possibly because in South Korea, many of these terms are “borrowed” from other languages, including English. For example, the Korean word for “Hellicopter” is: 헬리콥터 or hellikobteo. The North Koreans, on the other hand, use a literal translation of “vehicle that goes straight up after takeoff”. This is because such borrowed words are discouraged, if not outright forbidden, in North Korea – http://pinyin.info/news/2005/ban-loan-words-says-north-korea/

Lets not forget also that it is *trivial* to change the language/locale of a computer before compiling code on it.

3. It’s clear from the hard-coded paths and passwords in the malware that whoever wrote it had extensive knowledge of Sony’s internal architecture and access to key passwords. While it’s plausible that an attacker could have built up this knowledge over time and then used it to make the malware, Occam’s razor suggests the simpler explanation of an insider. It also fits with the pure revenge tact that this started out as.

4. Whoever did this is in it for revenge. The info and access they had could have easily been used to cash out, yet, instead, they are making every effort to burn Sony down. Just think what they could have done with passwords to all of Sony’s financial accounts? With the competitive intelligence in their business documents? From simple theft, to the sale of intellectual property, or even extortion – the attackers had many ways to become rich. Yet, instead, they chose to dump the data, rendering it useless. Likewise, I find it hard to believe that a “Nation State” which lives by propaganda would be so willing to just throw away such an unprecedented level of access to the beating heart of Hollywood itself.

5. The attackers only latched onto “The Interview” after the media did – the film was never mentioned by GOP right at the start of their campaign. It was only after a few people started speculating in the media that this and the communication from DPRK “might be linked” that suddenly it became linked. I think the attackers both saw this as an opportunity for “lulz” and as a way to misdirect everyone into thinking it was a nation state. After all, if everyone believes it’s a nation state, then the criminal investigation will likely die.

Wired has just covered this exact point – http://www.wired.com/2014/12/evidence-of-north-korea-hack-is-thin/

6. Whoever is doing this is VERY net and social media savvy. That, and the sophistication of the operation, do not match with the profile of DPRK up until now.

by Marc Rogers, Marc's Security Ramblings |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Shot of the Year

There’s a single shot in Jean-Luc Godard’s Goodbye To Language so astonishing that the sold-out crowd I saw the film with gasped in unison. Perhaps a generation of blockbuster entertainment and stock response has deadened the word, but the only way I can think to describe it is “awesome,” in the literal sense. It inspires awe. At the thousand-seat Ryerson Theater, where the film made its North American première this September, the surprise and delight were audible, in the form of exclamations and spontaneous applause. For a moment, it was less like a movie than a magic show. I sat mouth agape, stupefied. I felt like I’d just seen someone levitate.

Here’s what happens: A young woman, Ivitch (Zoé Bruneau), and an older man, Davidson (Christian Gregori), sit together on a park bench near the water, flipping through a book of paintings by French abstract landscapist Nicolas de Staël, when suddenly Ivitch’s husband pounces into the frame and hauls her out. The two cameras that compose the 3-D image diverge, and the shot seems to split into two: one tracks Ivitch as her husband circles her and brandishes a pistol, the other remains fixed on Davidson, until at last Ivitch returns to Davidson’s side and the two images converge into one. Seen in 3-D, each image is relegated to an eye: Ivitch on the right, Davidson on the left, leaving viewers to “cut” between them by keeping one eye closed and the other open. (David Ehrlich, reviewing the film for The Dissolve, called it a “choose your own adventure” device.) It’s montage taken to its logical extreme: in-eye editing.

This isn’t simply a great shot—it’s a new kind of shot altogether.

by Calum Marsh, Dissolve |  Read more:

Image: Jean-Luc Godard and Fabrice Aragno

How To Pack A Backpack

[ed. I've been reading Cheryl Strayed's "Wild", an epic adventure that starts out almost completely contrary to the advice given below.]

Don't be this guy. Carrying a backpack so large that it extends over your head and outside the width of your back makes for a long, arduous day on the trail. Instead, choose what you need wisely, then pack the bag efficiently for a lighter, more comfortable load. Here's how.

A typical checklist for backpacking:

• Tent
• Sleeping Pad
• Sleeping Bag
• Layers
• Flashlight
• Stove and fuel (we recommend a cat food can and denatured alcohol)
• Metal mug w/lid
• Lighter
• Knife
• First Aid Kit
• Spare Socks
• Sunscreen
• Food
• Map
• Compass
• Hand sanitizer
• Trash Bag
• Trowel
• Baby Wipes
• Toothbrush and paste

Doesn't sound like an awful lot, does it? Each individual trip may necessitate some additions to that basic list, but we're talking one or two items, not the kitchen sink. Paring your needs to the absolute minimum is the most effective way to keep weight down. Because you're taking so few items, you'll want each to be reliable, multi-use and light. Don't carry a two D-cell MagLite, carry a 1xCR2 headlamp that doubles as your keychain light.

The standard recommendation is no more than 1/3 your bodyweight on your back. I'm 190lbs and 1/3 my bodyweight is an absurd 62lbs. Typically, I target 25 or 30lbs for an all-up weight. Doing so makes hiking not just easier, but actually fun.

You can spend an insane amount of money to get weight down. For instance, for next week's trip I'll be testing a new sleeping (tent, bag, pad) system that adds up to only 5lbs total while sleeping more luxuriously than I'm used to. Total price for that is $1,200 though, which is outside my budget just like it's likely outside yours. A more achievable goal should be to acquire quality, multi-use gear that can be easily carried. Build up a system over time and it won't be a huge financial burden. Trying to buy all this stuff at once is going to be expensive any way you cut it, even if you're buying cheap crap. And, an item of gear with which you have experience, which you know works and which you know how to use is going to be a lot better companion on the trail than a fancy new gadget that's an unknown. I shudder at the thought of heading out for a trip with all-new gear; that's just a lot that could go wrong.

by Wes Siler, Indefinitely Wild |  Read more:

Image: Carlos Torres

YouTube Hitting a New ‘Play’ Button

This fall, Susan Wojcicki, the chief executive of YouTube, appeared on a panel at Vanity Fair’s inaugural technology conference in San Francisco. Sitting on the same stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts where Steve Jobs once introduced the iPad to the world, she discussed the future of the media with Richard Plepler, the chief executive of HBO.

At one point, the moderator asked Ms. Wojcicki if she thought cable television would still be around in 10 years. She paused for a moment before answering, with a bit of a sly smile, “Maybe.” The crowd laughed, even though just about everyone in the packed auditorium knew she was only half-joking.

If cable TV is gone in a decade, Ms. Wojcicki and the global digital video empire over which she presides will be one of the main causes. YouTube, founded in 2005 as a do-it-yourself platform for video hobbyists — its original motto was “Broadcast Yourself” — now produces more hit programming than any Hollywood studio. (...)

Every day, one billion people around the world watch more than 300 million hours of videos on YouTube. In November, 83 percent of Internet users in the United States watched a video on YouTube, according to comScore.

Yet for all of its influence as a cultural force, YouTube is still finding its way as an economic one. Viewers may be migrating online in droves from traditional television, but the advertising dollars have not yet followed. The marketing research company eMarketer estimates that YouTube will log about $1.13 billion in ad revenue in 2014, a small fraction of the $200 billion global TV advertising market. CBS, for instance, brought in nearly $9 billion last year.

It’s not that corporations aren’t eager to advertise online; they’re desperate to reach the younger demographic that chooses digital video over cable or broadcast TV. But advertising on YouTube isn’t like advertising on television. Subscribers don’t translate neatly into viewers. Airtime on TV is finite. Airtime on YouTube is effectively unlimited — 300 hours of new content are uploaded to the site every minute — which suppresses the value of ads across the platform.

Above all, the quality of most YouTube programming is too unpolished to draw big investments from many blue-chip advertisers. “Despite YouTube’s size, a tiny fraction of it is what we call ‘TV replaceable,’ content where we would take TV money and swap it over to YouTube,” said one ad executive who spoke on condition of anonymity because he does business with YouTube. “It’s a funny thing to be sitting on top of something this massive and not really be able to totally control what you’re selling advertising against.”

YouTube creators, meanwhile, complain that the company takes too much of the ad revenue — as much as 49 percent — and does too little to market and promote its stars, which makes it hard for them to leverage their celebrity. The danger for YouTube is that it will become a kind of farm system, developing talent that is picked off by other distributors that are willing to make bigger investments in it. Netflix has already been trying to lure away YouTube creators, as has Vessel, a web video start-up founded by a former chief executive of Hulu.

Right now, YouTube’s red-and-white “play” button is everywhere; the site dominates online video. But competition for eyes and advertisers is coming from pretty much every direction. Not only are traditional TV networks like CBS and HBO moving content online, but digital media like Instagram and Twitter are increasing their video offerings. So is Facebook, with its vast numbers of users and global presence. Some of YouTube’s most popular channels feature people playing video games; to protect this franchise, Google, YouTube’s owner, recently tried to buy Twitch, an enormously successful video game streaming site. It was outbid by Amazon.

These are some of the known quantities. There are also unknown ones: the legions of young, tech-knowledgeable entrepreneurs who were raised on YouTube and think they can build something better. It’s worth remembering that the idea for YouTube was hatched at a dinner party in San Francisco less than 10 years ago. Just as abruptly as it changed how we watch TV, it could become the victim of disruption itself.

by Jonathan Mahler, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: YouTube