Like, Comment, Subscribe: How Youtube Drives Google’’s Dominance and Controls Our Culture

The gripping inside story of YouTube, the company that upended media, culture, industry, and democracy--by a leading tech journalist

Across the world, people watch more than a billion hours of video on YouTube every day. Every minute, more than five hundred additional hours of footage are uploaded to the site, a technical feat unmatched in the history of computing. YouTube invented the attention economy we all live in today, forever changing how people are entertained, informed, and paid online. Everyone knows YouTube. And yet virtually no one knows how it works.

Like, Comment, Subscribe is the first book to reveal the riveting, behind-the-scenes account of YouTube’s technology and business, detailing how it helped Google, its parent company, achieve unimaginable power, a narrative told through the people who run YouTube and the famous stars born on its stage. It’s the story of a revolution in media and an industry run amok, how a devotion to a simple idea--let everyone broadcast online and make money doing so--unleashed an outrage and addiction machine that spun out of the company’s control and forever changed the world.

Mark Bergen, a top technology reporter at Bloomberg, might know Google better than any other reporter in Silicon Valley, having broken numerous stories about its successes and scandals. As compelling as the very platform it investigates, Like, Comment, Subscribe is a thrilling, character-driven story of technological and creative ingenuity and the hubris that undermined it.

Mark Bergen has been one of the leading business journalists covering everything about Google for over six years. He began reporting on the company for Recode, then moved to Bloomberg News in September of 2016. Before that, he covered telecom, technology and media for Advertising Age, the premier trade industry publication, and as a freelancer reporter from Asia for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Time, Reuters, and TheNewYorker.com. He has frequently discussed his YouTube reporting on Bloomberg TV and has appeared to discuss Google on CNBC, MSNBC, Bloomberg Radio, NPR and several NPR affiliate stations.