(Photo: NASA)

Microsoft recently updated its YouTube app for Windows Phones, but Google isn't too pleased with the results--going so far as to send a cease and desist. That's because Microsoft built in features allowing users to block ads. [The Verge]

A spokesman said they'd be "more than happy to include advertising but need Google to provide us access to the necessary APIs." [The Verge]

"Reading is an activity more likely to be on screen than on the printed page." So there's that. [BBC]

Car-sharing service Relay Rides has gotten the ax (locally at least) from the New York State’s Department of Financial Services, who said their insurance is “illegal and inadequate.” [PandoDaily]

Looks like, after technical problems, NASA's other-Earth-seeking Kepler Telescope is powering down. [Popular Science]

“Throw in with Apple and see if we can all make a go of this to create a real mainstream e-books market at $12.99 and $14.99.” That's the kind of email that, even if you are Steve Jobs, lands you in hot water with antitrust enforcers. [AllThingsD]

Call it the Jenna Marbles paradox, after the top YouTuber profiled in the New York Times earlier this year who, after more than one billion views and millions earned in ad revenue, still makes some of the most amateur videos you can imagine. As she put it, she makes “more money than I need, ever” and yet, if you had no idea who she was and watched one of her million-views-plus videos, you’d think this was the first time she’d ever turned on a video camera.

The same can pretty much be said about the rest of YouTube’s top “talent.” From Shane Dawson to Smosh, it’s almost universally bad content, bad jokes, bad premises, bad production value. I thought the same thing when I signed my first YouTube client to The Collective, in 2007--Dax Flame, a kid who had done millions of views on videos pretending to be mentally challenged. I just naturally assumed that over time, the content would get better, especially as the money poured in.

Check out some of the following videos, selected from top channels, all made within the last few months. Videos like KIDS in JAIL!!, How Guys Sleep, This was the FASTEST selling video game of 2006, Epic Epic Stunt, Ambercrombie & Fitch CEO Is A Dick, TWERKSANITY!!!, all have millions of views and subscribers but about $20 of production value and content investment between the lot of them. Even the best one, from The Young Turks network, could have been made in the studio of a high school media class.

Except the teams producing these videos are earning millions of dollars from it. This is what these people do for a living. As of 2012, there were literally thousands of YouTube partners making more than six-figures a year in advertising checks from Google alone, meaning that this is a damn well paying job to boot. As Benny Luo, founder and writer of NewMediaRockstars.com, a site which tracks YouTube closely, explained, there are “YouTube channels making $80,000-$100,000 per month in ad revenue."

Yet from what I see, their content has barely graduated from the original formula: webcam + person telling jokes that would get you booed off the stage of any comedy club / songs that no one would dare sing at even the worst open mic nights / low budget skits that would make Michael Scott squirm.

Make no mistake, the YouTube partners are professionals. Just really bad ones.

So, that raises the question: Why?

Why are YouTube videos still so terrible? Why hasn’t video content tremendously improved over the last half-decade? Why hasn’t the infusion of capital translated into quality art?

I ask for two reasons. One is pure fascination: How can someone do this for a living and be so bad at it? Two: YouTube has begun describing its viewers as Generation C--could it be that Generation C is just dumb or has low standards?

My answer is simple: Behind it all is the same old pageview problem we talked about in this column for the last year.

When content is 100 percent advertising supported and there is no paid subscription component, the quality of the content never rises above mediocre. The content may be cute, it may be controversial, it may generate lots of clicks but it will rarely, if ever, be good.

Why? Because there is no one for it to be good “for.” A newspaper supported by a subscription model has a daily reader it must deliver value for. How often have we said to ourselves about anything we subscribe to or pay to access: “$20 a month for this??? What a ripoff.” That is the pressure an old daily newspaper found itself under on a daily basis. If they are charging the reader for access to the content, they knew it must be good. A blog, on the other hand, charges no one for anything and is supported by pageviews so it doesn’t have any clue who it’s producing for--it just cares that it’s getting clicks, period. From who or how is irrelevant. Their only real customers are advertising networks whose demand is simply: volume, volume, volume.

Same, it appears, goes for video. Though many of the top YouTube personalities have more than a million subscribers (a status level that entitles you to a golden “play” plaque from YouTube) their relationship to those subscribers is very different that of television or Hulu or Netflix, where at least some of the subscribers pay in some form or another.

In other words, Generation C and the rest of the watching public are being shortchanged because their entertainers are motivated by bad incentives.

Professional YouTubers measure themselves by view count. The game--and the business--is to get as many views as possible for the channel and that means churning out videos in a low cost, high return model. If the video gets a lot of clicks, it must be good. It is profitable because it generated many ad impressions.

And there are lots of ways to get those clicks--gimmicks, low brow content, click-baity headlines, thumbnail bait, riding the Google wave, etc.--a few of which involve “making great stuff.” In fact, these YouTube pros play the same game as the Huffington Post or Business Insider: publish whatever you can as quickly as possible and have absolutely no compunction about bottom feeding in order to do so.

Google has tried actively to improve content over the years--to encourage producers to make the kind of premium content advertisers want to run with. Paying producers has clearly not had that effect. Like paying bloggers by the pageview, it just made them really good at gaming the system. Investing $100M in new channels didn’t work either--almost none of those new channels achieved success.

But now, I think there is reason to be hopeful. Google and YouTube have announced the launch of a subscription program where users actually pay for the content they are receiving. It’s only a little bit of money and a few channels right now (about 30 channels between .99 and $2.99). But it bodes well for the future of what should and could be a valuable source of art and culture.

It means we may be entering the next era in online video--one driven by subscription and therefore mutual value exchange rather than endless pandering and fighting for attention. An era that will hopefully have a much, much higher bar.

When someone like Jenna Marbles or Ray William Johnson actually take money from their fans, perhaps they will be obligated to innovate and grow. Or at least the producers who do produce content worth paying for will rise to the top. Perhaps with the luxury of guaranteed monthly income from subscribers, they will treat content production like a business and stop making videos from their living room on their laptop. Like any television program, they’ll know what each episode is “worth” and hopefully try to push that number higher by investing in the production of the content accordingly (as opposed to pushing what it costs lower and lower).

All mediums get professionalized at some point. Bloggers get book deals and then they start to care about typos and accuracy and writing something that will last. Television used to run crappy series sponsored by consumer products and defense companies, but now we live in a golden age of amazing TV.

It remains to be seen if the same will happen to online video. One thing we know for sure is that it can’t get any worse.

Ryan Holiday is the bestselling author of  Trust Me I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator and a PR strategist for brands and writers.

Population density as depicted by YouTube.

YouTube has just debuted an entertaining feature on its Trends page: a map where you can see which videos are the most popular by city and region. It is a K-hole without parallel.

For example! Did you know that while Alan Jackson's cover of George Jones' "He Stopped Loving Her Today" is unsurprisingly popular in the Southeast, Blake Shelton's latest redneck anthem pops up more often in the Midwest? The True Blood season six trailer, on the other hand, practically outlines the shape of the country--apparently raunchy vampires aren't as popular in the flyover states.

The more specific you get, the weirder it gets. New Yorkers overall are watching a 30-second preview for an EP called "Life is But a Game" by some band called "The CLOOD," which is actually pretty terrible. New Yorkers 13 to 17 are watching a Family Guy clip. Sort it for 18 to 25, and it's "No Stress- Billy G feat. Andrew Sterling." For 25 to 34, it's a video of someone's mom driving a 900 horsepower car.

Oh, and fun fact: Gen Xers of the Atlantic Seaboard love Queens of the Stone Age. And so forth.

Sort it by views, though, and the results look a lot more homogenous. Apparently everyone in America is watching this video of a water polo player falling into the pool while trying to shake someone's hand. Because we are one nation under dumb shit.

Future Diane Sawyers. (Photo: KNSD)

Here's a high school policy we can get behind: a group of students in San Diego were suspended and banned from their prom and commencement for making a twerking video. The nearly three dozen kids, who filmed a version of the raunchy viral video on school property, made it during their journalism class and posted it on YouTube.

"For those unfamiliar with the trend, twerking involves popping of the hips in a suggestive dance move," writes NBC San Diego. Tons of hip celebrities do it, like Diplo, Tyler Oakley, and Sephora regional manager Miley Cyrus. The video violates the school's code of conduct for suggestive behavior, so the future BuzzFeed bloggers were disciplined.

Many students took to Twitter in a show of solidarity for those accused. One wrote, "To show support for everybody getting suspended, we should all twerk at once at lunch #freethetwerkteam.”

Think we just found a new crop of kids for #followateen.

Update: A student allegedly from the high school emailed us this so we're posting it, because, journalism:

As a Scripps Ranch Journalism student, I know that it was media class members who organized, filmed, and edited the SRHS Twerk Team video. Journalism was not a part of this!

(Screencap: YouTube)

Hey, you! You who hates everything. I'm diggin' your smirk. Boy, have we got something to show you. If you thought flashmob wedding proposals were bad, get a load of this: some guy actually used an aerial drone to propose to his girlfriend. Because nothing says romance like "unmanned aerial craft that's typically used to kill people."

We've gotta hand it to the boyfriend: he clearly knows his SEO. How else would he get his video to go viral?

Point being: romance is dead, everything is the worst, etc etc. They do make a super cute couple though.

Look at all that spring-fed fiber in Provo. (Source: Flickr)

All it took for Google to buy Provo, Utah's fiber-optic network was a dollar. If only you had four quarters! [AP]

Yesterday, a federal judge ruled that YouTube did not violate Viacom’s copyright--despite the fact that several of the company’s shows were being illicitly uploaded onto the site. That's because the Google-owned service is protected by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's “safe-harbor provision.” [Los Angeles Times]

Time's very important "100 Most Influential People List" is packed with techies with fake-sounding titles, like "Internet talent discoverer" Scooter Braun. [AllThingsD]

Twitter announced it has teamed up with BBC America to offer "in-tweet branded video synced to entertainment TV series." What does that mean? Your guess is as good as ours. [CNet]

Amazon, looking to expand its international operations, has opened an office in Russia. [TechCrunch]

Scenic, boring West Virginia. (Photo: Flickr/tobyotter

As predicted, LinkedIn has shelled out $90 million for the mobile news aggregation startup Pulse. [AllThingsD]

Facebook is still the biggest social network for teens but they're getting, like, so totally bored with it. Ditto YouTube. [Business Insider]

People who believe they're "electrosensitive" are moving to a small town in West Virginia to escape Wi-Fi and cell phone service and other such rays. [Slate]

“Because people broadcast their lives on Facebook and Twitter and Vine, there’s a notion that everything that happens is going to be shared.” Social media is helping convince people they need to film their wedding proposals. [Forward]

Bitcoin has dropped 77 percent in two days. Hope everyone's learned their lesson. [Business Insider]

Twitter is reportedly launching its music service sometime either today or this weekend, to coincide with--sigh, of course--Coachella. [AllThingsD]

(Photo: Instagram/Mazy)

At this point, it seems fair to say that celebrity-associated tech startups occupy their own stratum of Startupland. There's the celebrity-backed startup, benefitting from the digital ambitions of investors like Scooter Braun, Ashton Kutcher, and Lady Gaga. Then there's the celebrity "cofounded" company (see: half the startups in Los Angeles). There's even startups that help brands harness the buying power of, say, Team Breezy.

Coming soon: a celebrity-backed venture capital fund, with a hashtag in the title, of course.

Hipset falls into a slightly different niche: startups that help musicians make money off social media. (Media companies aren't the only ones eyeing potential Internet revenue streams with rabid interest.) The cofounders of Hipset, Mazy Kazerooni and Matt Schlicht, started out as college dropouts, working their into influential positions at UStream, where they met rappers like Wiz Khalifa and Lil Twist.

They left UStream and took their celeb connections with them to found Tracks.by, a Facebook app to help musicians get likes and manage their content that made its way into Y Combinator's summer 2012 class and picked up a number of high profile angel investors like Dave Morin, Lil Wayne's manager Cortez Bryant, Alexis Ohanian, Matt Mullenweg, and AngelList's Naval Ravikant, as well as Menlo Ventures.

But, like many third-party developers before them, Tracks.by was wiped out by the whims of Facebook, Mr. Schlicht told Betabeat, when Zuck eliminated the ability to set a default tab for fan pages.

Oh, welp, onto the next social network!

Today Tracks.by is officially relaunching as Hipset, a music site they began last summer, and debuting the Hipset Network, which offers a similar service as Tracks.by but for YouTube. It is also launching a service called Boost which, "will allow people to create social media campaigns where their fans have to follow them on Instagram (or like them on Facebook, Follow them on Twitter) before accessing exclusive content," said Mr. Schlicht.

Where popular YouTube personalities can generate consistent income from the site, celebrities haven't been as focused on monetizing it, he explained. They often have few subscribers on their YouTube channel, despite the fact that fans watch videos on the site. Hipset thinks they can change that by asking fans to subscribe to a YouTube channel or like the artist on various social networks before accessing content. To do this, the startup uses YouTube's ability to make a video unlisted. Musicians tweet or share a link to a Boost page with the YouTube video embedded. In theory, all those additional likes and views will help rake in advertising dollars or paid downloads.

"For them, it's found money," Mr. Schlicht said. "They’re not paying us a retainer, we get a percentage of the revenue that’s generated off YouTube." He declined to specify the exact amount: "I don't necessarily want to put the percentage out there."

To differentiate itself, Hipset is going beyond optimizing existing videos and helping its celebrity clientele to collaborate on new content with top YouTube personalities like Sam Betesh (Xjawz), who is apparently "one of the most popular people on YouTube with over 1 million subscribers and over 300 million views." Hipset is also training musicians to adapt to the milieu. "Artists don’t typically acknowledge that the camera is there, YouTube is a place where you should be acknowledging the camera" to talk to fans, Mr. Schlicht explained.

Like they say, Facebook's loss is YouTube's gain.

(Photo: Inquisitr)

Google Ideas, the search giant's “think/do tank," recently funded a study about Internet usage among gang members. Fast Company reports on the results, and surprise, surprise: Rather than committing complicated cyber crimes or crowd-funding gun purchases, their main activities involve "self-promotion and braggadocio." Primarily by posting YouTube videos.

Gang members, they're online narcissts like everybody else!

Fast Company says:

Social networking sites are widely used for self-promotion. The researchers found that 46% of the gang members polled reported posting gang-related videos online, and that 56% reported watching gang-related videos online.

A quarter of respondents also copped to Googling the names of rival gangs to "see what shows up."

In addition, 11 percent said said they used the Internet for "organizing activities," and 19 percent claimed their gang had some sort of website. Most of the respondents, however, said they keep the incriminating stuff offline: “[We] don’t talk about it [gang business] because the police is on there,” one interviewee informed researchers.

Maybe they should have googled whether YouTube videos are admissible in court.

Hullo?

For a brief period on Sunday, several popular K-pop videos were blocked from international viewers. And, as Billboard reports, devoted fans reacted (as you'd expect) like a bunch of junkies arriving home to discover their stash stolen. In short, they freaked right the fuck out.

The affected videos were from artists represented by the agency Cube Entertainment, which distributes music in the U.S. through Universal Music Group. Fans went to watch their favorite videos and (according to the Daily Dot) received messages saying they'd been "restricted." Cue hysterics on Tumblr and Twitter:

https://twitter.com/Kpopbucketlist_/status/315670560480841728

Universal Music Group felt compelled to update its Facebook page, in an attempt to placate the hordes: "Glitch at YouTube blocking videos. We're doing all we can to get them back online," adding #GiveUsKPop.

Fans suspected more sinister motives, suggesting it was an attempt to steer traffic toward Vevo or, even more alarmingly, some sort of protectionist move to keep K-pop Korean:

Reports from these fanbases said that Universal wanted to keep K-pop in Korea and was subsequently blocking videos in the U.S. and U.K. with other countries soon to follow.

But the videos are now back, and so K-pop fans can rest easy until the next crisis. (There's always another crisis.)

(h/t The Daily Dot)