Frankly, I'm a scholar (and maker) of independent, avant-garde and activist media for a reason. I'm not passionate about popular culture nor the questions it raises and so these were not the questions I was asking about YouTube, even though I willingly snared myself within its structuring logics of capital, censorship, popularity and entertainment, and I would follow my students' lead when they wanted to pursue such questions (for instance the popularity project of 2007).
From my students' and my own work I was quick to identify that there are actually two YouTubes, the second being what I called NicheTube, "the vast sea of little-seen YouTube videos that are hard to find given YouTube's architecture of ranking and user-generated tags." (This and other descriptive, made-up terms necessary to adequately and efficiently critique YouTube are found in the video-book's Glossary). But any pay-off of "discovering" and then spending time in NicheTube eventually paled for me too, given the necessary trade-off of the always abusive onslaughts of crap from YouTube proper.