Hello and welcome to Bullish, TechCrunch’s first talk show. This is our first international episode, taped at Disrupt London 2015 in the Copper Box Arena.
This week we dug into YouTube, the video platform, and how people use the product for far more than cat videos. In fact, some popular channels on the service are businesses in and of themselves.
YouTube Star. Vine Star. Snapchat Star. Those are phrases that might have sounded hilarious only a few years ago, but they are now a common reality. The scale of these platforms is an interesting side component of the larger cord cutting phenomenon. Simply put, the more time that a person spends watching online video, the less time they are spending in front of the television.
To help understand the YouTube ecosystem we asked Jamie Spafford to come by Disrupt, and have a chat with us. Spafford is part of SORTEDfood, a group of cooks that produce videos for YouTube. They have more than a million subscribers and over 160 million views. That’s quite a few.
I wanted to know if YouTube is bulletproof, and why Spafford had originally picked the service to host his videos. That he was an affable chap made the chat all the more enjoyable.
To close, meditate on how large YouTube has become in 10 years. Then consider how large Instagram and Snapchat and Vine have become in less time. I almost want to say that the pace of disruption — atomizing? — of the video landscape is increasing. Something to think on.
Bullish airs every Wednesday at 7 am Pacific, and 10 am Eastern.