A look at YouTube’s “coolhunters” who were tasked with finding and promoting talented YouTubers in the company’s early years, before the algorithms took over (Mark Bergen/The Atlantic)

Nilay Patel / The Verge:
Q&A with Mark Bergen on his book “Like, Comment, Subscribe”, chronicling YouTube’s evolution from a scrappy startup to a pivotal part of Google and social media  —  Mark Bergen takes us inside the black box … YouTube has always been fascinating to me because it’s such a black box …

Mark Bergen / The Verge:
A book excerpt details how YouTube’s love affair with PewDiePie soured in 2017, before he stopped pushing boundaries and signed a livestreaming deal in 2020  —  The Anti-Defamation League, a nonprofit focused on antisemitism, received an unusual invitation from YouTube in early 2017: come meet our biggest influencer.

Miles Kruppa / Wall Street Journal:
A look at Spotter and Jellysmack, two companies offering YouTubers cash in exchange for up to five year of ad sales generated by licensing their old videos  —  Investors bet the back catalogs of top YouTubers will increase in value  —  TikTok, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts: Who Will Win the Short-Video Race?

Miles Kruppa / Wall Street Journal:
A look at Spotter and Jellysmack, two companies offering YouTubers cash in exchange for up to five year of ad sales generated by licensing their old videos  —  Investors bet the back catalogs of top YouTubers will increase in value  —  TikTok, Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts: Who Will Win the Short-Video Race?

Manish Singh / TechCrunch:
New York- and Bengaluru-based Amagi, a streaming video and ads infrastructure startup, raised a $100M+ Series F led by General Atlantic at a $1.4B valuation  —  Amagi, which offers cloud broadcast and targeted advertising software to scores of media and entertainment giants …

Varsha Bansal / Rest of World:
How India’s gig workers, tired of algorithms dictating their lives, are using Telegram to exchange cheap hacks on how to game the platforms to their advantage  —  Tired of the obscurity around black box algorithms that dictate their lives, India’s gig workers are coming up with jugaads to game the system.