When Jawed Karim had himself filmed in the spring of 2005 speaking four rather insignificant sentences into a video camera, the then 26-year-old looked a bit awkward. At the same time, he decidedly sets the direction. On April 23, 2005, Karim, one of the three founders of the video platform Youtube, uploaded the nineteen second long clip with poor image quality to the internet. It is the first video on Youtube. You can see him with a dark blue sweater and a rain jacket in front of the elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo. Only four sentences can be heard: “I am standing here in front of the elephants. And the cool thing about them is that they have really, really long trunks. And that's cool. There is nothing more to say. ”These are sentences whose message is as unmistakable as it is ingenious: This is YouTube. And (almost) anything can happen here - it doesn't matterhow inconsequential, trivial, or irrelevant.

David Lindenfeld

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In the early years, this set the trend in the battle between competing video platforms for user attention.

With the slogan “Broadcast yourself”, Youtube also placed the focus on the individual who was supposed to “broadcast themselves” and thus laid the foundation for numerous formats that were created in the years that followed.

They are no longer about banal facts about elephants.

Big goals

Youtube has meanwhile changed: to a portal on which conspiracy theorists can often send their messages to the world unhindered, but on the other hand increasingly serious content can also be found. There are countless channels with tips and tricks, those that convey knowledge, and increasingly independent journalistic formats that sometimes approach their topics from a different perspective than the established media. This is relevant for journalism because YouTube has the potential to reach younger people. In Germany, according to a study from 2018, 89 percent of 18 to 34-year-olds use YouTube. Ascending trend.

In this country, the eponymous channel of the video production company Hyperbole has set itself high goals with such a program: "We want HyperboleTV to become the largest independent YouTube channel for journalistic content in Germany within twelve months," says the company's founder, Bastian Asdonk, im Interview with FAZ Hyperbole has been one of around 60 media companies from all over the world since the beginning of August, part of the “Google Sustainability Lab”, a network that provides support in the implementation of sustainable and independent video journalism formats on YouTube and promotes exchange.

The success of such media is usually not based on copying and replacing conventional formats, but rather on complementing what is on offer. Hyperbole succeeded in doing this with the series “Ask a cliché”, which was initially published in cooperation with the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Many videos have already been viewed millions of times, the channel claims to have seven million views per month and a “watch time” of 880,000 hours. The idea behind the format is simple: the questions are not asked by journalists, but by the audience. A protagonist with a specific background is invited for each episode. The audience can ask him questions of all kinds in advance, the editorial team chooses.