YouTube Space

» see youtube.com/space as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

There were ten of these buildings in the world and none of them was within two thousand kilometers of me. London, Los Angeles, Tokyo, New York, São Paulo, Rio, Berlin, Paris, Mumbai, Dubai. Toronto had one for two years. A Turkish creator wanting to use one had to fly to Berlin or Dubai and find somewhere to sleep, which puts free studio time somewhere north of a thousand euros.

The idea was straightforward and, for its moment, generous. YouTube was competing for the people making the videos, and the thing those people could not buy was a proper room. So Google built rooms. Soundproof stages, lighting rigs, cameras, green screens, edit suites with machines that could handle 4K, and staff to run workshops. If your channel cleared the subscriber threshold you booked a slot and it cost nothing.

The first one opened in london in july 2012, inside Google's UK offices, and moved in august 2016 to a purpose-built 20,000 square foot space at King's Cross with three stages and street-level access so you could get a car through the door. Los Angeles and Tokyo followed in 2013, New York and São Paulo in 2014, Berlin, Paris and Rio in 2015, Mumbai in 2016, Dubai in 2018. Berlin ran with MET Film School and set its bar at a thousand subscribers, which was low enough that ordinary people got in.

~ the dossier ~

~ how it landed ~

For a stretch in the middle of the 2010s these places were the closest thing YouTube had to a physical culture. Collaborations happened because two channels were booked in the same building on the same afternoon. The Tokyo Space kept a traditional Japanese house set, a classroom set and a modular set that could be dressed as a game show, permanently built, which is the sort of infrastructure a solo creator will never own. The London Space had a shop where YouTubers sold merchandise, and a coffee bar.

The strategy underneath it was already shifting before the pandemic. Toronto opened in april 2017 and closed in may 2019. Reporting from the time says Mumbai, Toronto and Dubai were wound down in 2019 as part of a pivot away from permanent buildings, which conflicts with Wikipedia's article, still saying today that Mumbai, São Paulo and Dubai remain open. The two accounts cannot both be right and neither side has updated.

~ the funny part ~

The Spaces closed in early 2020 with everything else, and stayed closed for a year. On 18 february 2021 Robert Kyncl, then YouTube's chief business officer, announced that Berlin, London, Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rio and Tokyo would not reopen. He described the replacement as a flexible new strategy of pop-up Spaces and virtual programming that would reach more regions and more creators.

He was not entirely wrong. A pop-up in Lagos or Istanbul reaches people a permanent studio in Paris never will, and the year of remote workshops proved the teaching part travels fine. But the thing that made a Space useful was the part that does not travel: a room with soundproofing and a lighting grid that somebody else paid for. You cannot pop that up, and a virtual event does not give a creator with a phone and a bedroom access to a sound stage.

By 2021 the top of YouTube was professionalized anyway, with production companies and studios of their own, and the bottom was shooting vertical video on a phone. The Space had been built for the middle, for the creator who was serious enough to want a real set and too small to rent one, and the middle was exactly the group that stopped being YouTube's strategic problem.

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