YouTube and Bookworm? Intriguing combination indeed. You’re no doubt wondering what YouTube has to do with Bookworm. Well as it happens, quite a lot, but first let’s take a look at YouTube. YouTube launched in 2005 with co-founder Jawed Karim’s awkward video “Me at the Zoo”, taped in front of the elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo. After slow beginnings the revenue earning potential of the platform was realised and the site exploded to the tech behemoth it is today with 30.6 billion monthly visits and 2nd on the list of most visited sites globally with 3.7 million videos uploaded every day. This has essentially turned the world completely upside down with teenage content creators, or “YouTubers” as they are affectionately known, making millions of dollars while the rest of us are nearing the end of a “9 to 5” career having just paid off the mortgage. These newly materialised jeans and t shirt clad youths now drive brightly coloured Lamborghinis and swan into exclusive realty retreats like the Hamptons and buy properties in a similar fashion to hamburgers, leaving the “one-percenters” in demoralised disbelief. So how did this gargantuan shift in demographic tectonics occur? To put it simply…algorithms. YouTube, as are so many of the social media platforms, is infested with algorithms which all work towards showing you what you want to view before you even know what you want to view. All to keep you engaged and attached to the platform for longer than you ever anticipated and willing to admit. The most successful YouTubers, have analysed these algorithms carefully with tremendous financial success, creating carefully crafted and specialised content which the algorithms devour and in turn, with clinical precision, push at viewers with disturbing regularity and with a hint of passive aggressiveness. Content creation by the youth of today is an artform which kowtows to the YouTube algorithms but once the algorithms are appeased, they reward generously. The other significant secret of YouTube is that videos uploaded to the site never die a natural death. A newly posted video has a somewhat predictable life cycle, with a rush of views in the beginning and a gradual levelling off as time passes giving the impression that the video has reached its end date. But the professional content creators know that this is not the case. A well-developed YouTube channel with a healthy number of videos and regular uploads allows these early videos to continue to flourish and attract views, producing constant revenue. And how these YouTubers sup from these “infinite money glitches”. So, what does all this YouTube talk have to do with Bookworm and how can authors and readers benefit from this powerful social media phenomenon? Bookworm is developing a YouTube channel in unison with its website. The benefits of this initiative to authors will become more apparent in phase 2 of Bookworm’s life. In the meantime, authors can upload their books to the platform, let us know, and we will create a vibrant, exciting and immersive “YouTube short” to promote the work. And don’t be concerned, this is all done for free. So, jump on Bookworm to register and have your literary works turned into a promotional video on YouTube. And remember…YouTube videos never really disappear.