304 Personal Content Experience: Managing Digital Life in the Mobile Age interest can create groups, subscribe to channels, and so forth. At the time of writing, there are around 100 million views on YouTube daily, with around 65 000 new video clips uploaded per day. YouTube has 21 nearly 20 million unique users per month. In addition to the web site itself, YouTube videos can be embedded into external web sites, blogs, or MySpace accounts. YouTube is an extreme example of sharing personal content. In effect, with YouTube the term “broadcast” could also be used, since by default the shared videos are available to the general public. Sharing the material on the Internet can create a virtuous circle. The growth of YouTube demonstrates this effect nicely. As a video clip is seen by more and more people, these people in turn contribute comments and new material. The material resides in the Net, so people can send the links to the videos from almost any place, including mobile devices. As a consequence, while previously people would show their home videos to friends, they now pick out the best bits and upload them to YouTube. The site can accommodate video material from all parts of the Long Tail – from home videos seen by just a few people, to quickly spreading pop scandals of global reach. Looking at the list of most popular videos on YouTube reveals a range of content types. Funny clips abound, much like they do in candid camera and “silly world” TV show formats. Music videos are popular, despite the copyright risks. Great TV commercials meet new global audiences. Amateur fi lms and art acts are much uploaded, if not downloaded. A particular class of user-created content are “jackass” type stunts, where ordinary people attempt funny, silly, or just plain dangerous tricks, such as driving a bicycle down a hill backwards. This illustrates our need to get that 15 megabytes of fame. 7.3.5 Video Sharing Comes of Age Video sharing is now one of the most rapidly spreading Internet appli- cations. People are uploading videos by thousands every hour, and downloading them by millions. Usually this is carried out with PCs, but mobile devices are now catching on. Illegal sharing of commercial video material has been the norm in P2P networks for some time. Mobile TV broadcasts are starting. By the end of 2006, Google had famously acquired YouTube, for 1.65 billion USD. All in all, we can say that video has become a viable data type in the Internet – if not yet on the mobile Internet. 21 http://www.youtube.com/t/fact_sheet