YouTube Partner

The YouTube video hosting service constitutes a social networking website on which practically any individual or organization with Internet access can upload videos that can be seen almost immediately by wide audiences. As the world's largest video platform, YouTube has had impact in many fields, with some individual YouTube videos having directly shaped world events.

In June 2008, Michael Wesch observed in YouTube a cultural phenomenon of "networked individualism" and the significance of the webcam collapsing the context of communication. In 2011, Willow Scobie asserted the anthropological significance of YouTube and noted evidence of a "transformative experience" for some people, and that some could identify as being a "YouTuber".

In his 2010 TED Talk on crowd-accelerated innovation, TED curator Chris Anderson preliminarily noted that human brains are "uniquely wired" to decode high-bandwidth video, and that unlike written text, face-to-face communication of the type that online videos convey has been "fine-tuned by millions of years of evolution." Referring to several YouTube contributors, Anderson asserted that "what Gutenberg did for writing, online video can now do for face-to-face communication," that it's not far-fetched to say that online video will dramatically accelerate scientific advance, and that video contributors may be about to launch "the biggest learning cycle in human history."

Khan Academy founder Salman Khan, a former hedge fund analyst, grew YouTube video tutoring sessions for his cousin in 2006 into what Forbes' Michael Noer called "the largest school in the world"—a non-profit with ten million students and a reported $7 million annual operating budget (2012). By the end of 2013, Khan Academy's network of YouTube channels grew to 26,000 no-fee videos that collectively had been viewed 372 million times. Noer reasoned that technology had finally become poised to disrupt how people learn, given the advent of widespread broadband, low costs to create and distribute content, rapidly proliferating mobile devices, a shift in social norms to accept the efficacy of online learning and a generation of tech-savvy people willing to embrace it, with students watching lectures and working on their own schedule at their own pace.

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Wikipedia