Blending as it does into a forgettable suburban strip mall, Metro Skateshop is easy to miss. Not so its owner, Joel Jutagir.The skateboarding fanatic has turned his decades-long obsession with filming himself and his friends into a popular channel on the video-hosting site YouTube, where roughly 15,000 subscribers regularly tune in to see his tricks.
"YouTube isn't just a video platform; it's really a social networking site, a place to show like-minded people what you're up to," says Jutagir, 36. "I've been totally amazed at the response."Perhaps no more so than the folks at Google-owned YouTube, the Web's dominant video site with nearly a half-billion unique visitors a month.
If YouTube 1.0 was about showcasing random clips, YouTube 2.0 represents a quest to become a genuine entertainment destination. The company has become so convinced that grassroots content creators such as Jutagir are the key to this metamorphosis that last week it sent him and 24 others to its first-ever Creator Camp in New York.
Winners of the YouTube NextUp program were selected by users of the popular website. They received $35,000 to spend at will as well as training on everything from lighting a scene to marketing their brand. In return, YouTube hopes to grow its viewership and sell more ads targeted at specific demographics, revenue it then shares with the videos' creators.
Diverse as America itself, the attendees ranged from a recent Korean émigré from Manhattan who is winning fans with her cooking videos, to a kid in Nebraska hoping to launch a homegrown MTV. Some of these would-be Scorseses eke out four-figure incomes through the ads on their YouTube pages. A few pull in six digits. All see a self-made future online.
"Getting together like this made me see that if I want it badly enough, making videos can be a way of life," says Jutagir, who immersed himself in courses with titles such as "Building a Loyal Audience" and "Breakfast with Rob Burnett," the Emmy-winning TV writer. "For a growing number of people, this is not a hobby, it's a career, and we're just trying to move them up the ladder faster," says Tom Sly, YouTube's head of strategic partner development and programs, noting that another 20 up-and-comers will attend video training seminars in Los Angeles and Chicago this summer.
Sly bristles when asked whether such amateurs can pump out videos and shows able to compete for eyes with more professional Hollywood fare. "Amateur is not an accurate description of who they are. I'm continually impressed by the writing and production quality of these videos," he says. "This is about the American dream, which technology is now enabling in ways we never imagined possible."
Stressing audience interaction: Such hyperbole is rooted in reality. YouTube may have started out as a place to watch America's funniest home videos, but it steadily has morphed into one of the key ways in which we consume media. With the proliferation of broadband, television — once the sole in-home delivery system for visual arts — is being challenged by Apple- and Netflix-connected monitors that have some viewers unplugging from cable companies altogether.
"The eye is the prime sense used to take in the world, and the very definition of TV is changing to include whatever you see on your smartphone, your tablet or even the digital sign in Times Square," says Tracy Swedlow, CEO of InteractiveTV Today newsletter and executive producer of a recent conference in San Francisco called "The TV of Tomorrow Show."
"Interacting with your audience through video is unquestionably a new dimension for TV as we know it, and people are inventing new content formats all the time," says Swedlow, who recently saw a prototype of a small, disposable screen that would slip into a magazine much like a blown-in subscription card. "There are plenty of people learning on the job as the technology mushrooms. YouTube has democratized the concept of the professional."