How the YouTube Community Got its Start: An Interview with Mia Quagliarello, YouTube’s First Community Manager.
Mia joined YouTube in 2006, just a year after it launched. She reflects on what she learned building community in YouTube’s early years.
I first met Mia fresh out of college. I cold emailed her asking for advice and she kindly obliged me. Now, years later, I asked her to share her experience as YouTube’s first community manager.
YouTube is a once-in-a-generation product. Ten years after launch, they’re reporting 1,300,000,000 users, which is an absolutely insane number. (More stats here.) I wanted to know what Mia’s role was in all of that. What projects did she lead as a YouTube Community Manager? How did that work affect YouTube’s growth? Did it?
One thing we go deep into is the content curation Mia’s team managed. By unearthing hidden gems, they helped show people what was possible on the YouTube and shape our perception of the brand.
You can read some highlights from our interview below, or if you want the deeper cut, you can listen to the full, unedited conversation:
Bailey Richardson: What was your first day at YouTube like?
Mia Quagliarello: The office was in San Mateo above a pizza shop. I remember my first day, I came up the stairs and there was an engineer sleeping on the couch. I sat by a microwave. They had rats. It was kind of like dorm living, but it was exciting.
I sat by a microwave. They had rats. It was kind of like dorm living, but it was exciting.
I want to say YouTube had like one million users at that point. Or maybe it was 10 million, it was so long ago. But it was pretty small. I remember a cake in the office recognizing the milestone.
BR: What did you do on your first day, do you remember?
MQ: My first day was writing a blog post. I was kind of introducing myself as a new face to the community.
I also remember picking videos to feature on the homepage. A lot of the units were filled by algorithms, and, this wasn’t very clear, but there was a module on the homepage that we could feature videos in.
BR: What made a video worth featuring on the homepage or the blog?
MQ: We didn’t have any formal guidelines, but I looked to complement what was popular.
I felt like part of my job was helping to shape the brand of YouTube—how people felt about it and maybe helping them think about the brand in different ways.
At that point, lot of what people thought about YouTube was lowest common denominator stuff like cats and bedroom vloggers and viral videos, which, of course, everyone loves. But there were also incredible stories of teenagers needing an organ and finding it through a vlog. Or the revolution in the Middle East—a lot of that played out on YouTube. And the extreme creativity of tilt shift videos and stop motion and original music. I was excited by a lot of the art that I was seeing.
BR: Content curation like what you did seems crucial for expanding people’s understanding of what’s possible on a platform like YouTube, but what I’m not sure of is if that ‘hand of God’ scales well.
How do you feel about that? Where does curation fit in with community work as a company grows?
MQ: It’s something we’re actually trying to tackle at Flipboard. On Flipboard we’re handpicking certain things and we’re also informing the algorithms. We have a team who is working on those in Vancouver and our editorial team will let them know, “Hey, we’ve noticed these things are off topic.” Or, “You’ve got a lot of stories from well-known sources and some random sources, but we’re missing the whole middle layer of great fashion blogs,” for example.
You get into the filter bubble problem, which is where editorial and community can come in and help — that “hand of God” to help people eat their broccoli as well as their cupcakes.
It seems like where this whole debate is headed is customization and personalization—giving the user the controls to see what they want to see. But then you get into the filter bubble problem, which is where editorial and community can come in and help—that “hand of God” to help people eat their broccoli as well as their cupcakes. Or to get out of their filter bubble or just discover new things. So we’re trying to find the right balance.
BR: What would you say was the most challenging thing you faced at YouTube?
MQ: One of the biggest kerfuffles was when we did a channel re-design.
Your channel is basically your identity on YouTube. I didn’t realize how much people’s identities were tied up in these online identities. You messed with that, you messed with their space, you messed with their stuff.
I didn’t realize how much people’s identities were tied up with their online identities. You messed with that, you messed with their space.
We rolled out the new channels in two different phases. In the first phase, we were totally unprepared for how angry people would be. Then in the second phase, we were over prepared. We had a war room of 10 people around the table getting ready to respond to people on social media, and help users with their questions—to be really present.
One of the things that is the death knell for a community manager is to not listen, to not to be present. That’s terrible. Even if it’s a simple “Thanks so much for your feedback,” you have to acknowledge people.
BR: One thing that has impressed me so much about YouTube is that it is so powerful today, ten years down the line. Why is that? Do you think community played a part?
MQ: I think that YouTube would have grown in spite of what we did. Honestly, I think our work was nice to have, but it would have grown and proliferated anyway. It was so innovative and it filled such a need.
I think that YouTube would have grown in spite of what we did… It was so innovative and it filled such a need.
BR: Yeah. It seems a community won’t exist if people aren’t really stoked about the product or service you’ve made.
MQ: You asked me before the interview about communities I admired and the theme for those is quality over quantity—like Medium and Quora. The communities and platforms that seem to have invested in getting smart people on to set the example and set the tone.
That’s what we’re doing in Flipboard, we’re trying to set the tone for our community and our users.
BR: That’s a nice way of thinking about it — “setting the tone.” When you work at a company that makes a software product, you realize there are engineers sitting there that are writing lines of code that then become shapes, and those shapes become the app that sits on your phone, but it sits lifeless unless people fill it with content.
MQ: Yeah. These platforms would be nothing without the people. They are the lifeblood of the platform and the customer is always right. So I’ve learned that at the very least you need to listen and you need to acknowledge and respond—to do what can you do with those insights to make the product better, and also make people feel seen who really care.
Platforms would be nothing without the people. They are the lifeblood of the platform and the customer is always right.
BR: Before we wrap up, I’d love to ask you about another community that I know is important to you: Burning Man. [Mia runs the Burning Man Instagram account.] What do you think it is about Burning Man that makes it so special to people?
MQ: Until I got involved with Burning Man, I don’t think I really saw “community” as something that was a positive to be cultivated, or a part of culture even.
I went for the first time 10 years ago just before I started at YouTube. I was pregnant with my son, and I thought, “I don’t know how my life’s gonna change. I may never make it to Burning Man if I don’t go now.” So I went six months pregnant.
BR: No way!
MQ: Yes. [Chuckles.] And I loved it.
I see a lot of live music, and when I go to a show and I sometimes feel that the energy of the place is off, but at Burning Man event the energy feels really right.
At Burning Man, you’re all in it together in this extreme environment, and it’s one of the few places where people are very open. It’s one of the few places where you can just smile at a stranger and make eye contact.
BR: I like that description—“a place where you can smile at a stranger.” It’s so hard to create spaces where that happens.
MQ: A friend of mine attributes that warmth and openness to the sheer scale of the creativity at Burning Man.
People are creating these amazing things not for commercial gain, but because they’re so moved by that will to create and to see people’s reactions..
People are creating these amazing things not for commercial gain, but because they’re so moved by that will to create and to see people’s reactions. It’s pretty amazing.
BR: That seems reminiscent of the early days at YouTube and, for me, Instagram.
Mia, thank you so much for your time.
MQ: You’re welcome!
Three highlights from Mia
Communities don’t appear out of thin air. You need to over deliver for people to rally around what you’ve built.
The goal is collaboration. If you are able to build that kind of social platform — one where people make the content that populates it — you just might find yourself at the center of a passionate creative community like YouTube. You can collaborate with a community like that in a myriad of different interesting and creative ways.
Curation sets the tone. For YouTube, perhaps the most poignant way they collaborated with their users was how they highlighted exceptional YouTubers to “set the tone” for the rest of the platform. If the engineers and designers at YouTube were the ones building a tool for people to use, their community of passionate, creative people showed the world why it was so special.
This case study was produced by the team at People & Company.
We published a book, host a podcast, and we work with organizations like Nike, Porsche, Substack and Surfrider as strategy partners, bringing confidence to how they’re building communities.