For the exercise “What are the Genres of YouTube” instead of focusing on the funny vids or memes that were mentioned in many of the other created categories such as WTF?, Pranks, and Animals doing human things, I wanted to draw attention to the practical aspect of YouTube. Many creators using Kickstarter also post their video on YouTube, (I assume) so that it can be easily embedded in a blog post introducing the Kickstarter project to their following fans. It’s not as established a genre as I expected – merely searching Kickstarter doesn’t exclusively pull up proposal videos – but I was able to easily find several instances of videos of projects that previously interested me.

As for the question, “Is YouTube really just video as we know it on the web or something different?” I really can’t give a definitive answer – in many ways YouTube IS how the web has video. It seems to be the most widespread method of embedding video into another site.