Broadcast yourself on YouTube - really?

One essential reason for people to publish on the web is to express themselves freely. YouTube facilitates this self-expression by allowing users to upload video content they generated. This paper investigates to what extent the videos on YouTube are self-generated content, instead of amalgamated content that was mainly professionally authored in the first place. Results show that most of the popular content on YouTube was professionally generated, even though a random sample shows that there is plenty of user-generated content available -- it just does not make the cut. As a result we propose that YouTube is more of a social filter, allowing anyone to share content they find interesting rather than a way for aspiring creative people to show their creative abilities to the world. The outcome is a set of requirements which describe better means for YouTube to support better authoring and presentation of video, where the core research direction is focused on the self-representation of humans in the realm of their creative possibilities on one side as well as the stimulation of new insights on existing material to stimulate new creative impulses.