The most obvious changes in YouTube have to do with its finances and expanding financial opportunities for its authors, including day-to-day users, corporations, and "old-media." YouTube's amazing and unstoppable growth—in numbers of videos, users, and uses—is not only a financial issue, however, but one that begs larger questions about the production, circulation, and ownership of media, knowledge, identity, and the viewing and buying habits of a great many of the world's citizens. Over its short history, YouTube (or Google, really) has written itself into nearly everything we do as a society, so understanding how YouTube is networked is a vital task of even more relevance then when I began this project. More money and viewing on YouTube, and related changes in the media sector, have also affected the quality of (many) YouTube videos, what I once called the good video/bad video divide. Technological changes have also altered the meaning of this binary. I'd love to see this considered seriously. There have been many legal changes and challenges throughout YouTube's history, primarily around copyright, but YouTube is still organized by censorship, I'd warrant. Alterations in design, architecture, and search have made some things easier to see and find. But NicheTube still exists, doesn't it? YouTube, like the Internet it reflects and produces, is clearly a much more corporate space then when I entered in 2007 (the linking of the class page to my private Google account, its monetization, and the advertisements found everywhere upon it being only some of the more obvious indications). Of course, while the students in the class always understood how serious was our focus (even if many of the videos were silly), as did the media once they talked to me or the students, academia came a bit more slowly to YouTube and other social media. But now we're here so I've actually added two sections to the newest version of the course, one on memes the other on music videos, learning from good recent scholarly books on these YouTube staples. Finally, this supposedly being "a good year for feminism" (or so it says on the Internet), we might want to consider that feminism, and other social movements have also changed since 2005 (on the Internet).
I am teaching the course in 2015 because I am curious whether these many recent changes may have inaugurated significant and not superficial changes in YouTube (and social media) culture itself.