YouTube. Some people watch videos. Some people make videos for fun. Some people make videos
as a career. In any case, YouTube has been at the centre of the internet ever since its
launch in late 2005, and today it ranks as the world’s 3rd most visited site, behind
only by Google themselves, and Facebook. To celebrate the success of this incredible platform,
we count 10 amazing facts about YouTube.
10. Today, YouTube has over 1 billion users, with
over 300 hours of video content being uploaded to YouTube every single minute, which adds
up to 432000 hours a day. That means 18,000 people would need to dedicate their entire
lives to watching YouTube videos 24 hours a day to make sure all of the content is watched,
and that doesn’t count for the billions of years of footage that already exists.
9. YouTube was originally intended to be a video version of an online dating service,
and apparently it was influenced by the website hot or not – where you vote for the hottest
people, and if you both rate each other hot, you’ll be connected so you can chat, and
I assume, engage in coitus. In its early attempts to popularize the site, YouTube offered $100
to attractive girls who posted 10 or more videos. Surprisingly the founders didn’t
receive a single reply to this offer, which was posted on Craigslist
8. The first video ever posted to the website was titled “Me at the zoo”, which shows
co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo casually talking about elephants, and how
cool their trunks are.. The video was uploaded on April 23 2005, and can still be viewed
on the site right now, with over 18 million views to date.
7. Several companies have sued YouTube because they believe YouTube hasn’t done enough
to prevent copyright infringement. In 2008, Viacom—which owns MTV, VH1, Comedy Central,
and Nickelodeon—won a court ruling that required YouTube to hand over 12 terabytes
of data relating to user information and user’s viewing habits. Essentially they wanted to
find out if users were watching copyrighted material on YouTube and if so, they could
potentially take legal action against these users. Of course this made absolutely no sense,
because a user cannot possibly know what exactly they will be watching before clicking on the
link, and even if they can it’s not the responsibility of the user to know what content
is copyrighted or not. Thankfully In 2010, Viacom’s $1 billion lawsuit was rejected
under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. While the case was reinstated in 2012, in
2013, YouTube defeated Viacom once again under the “safe harbour” provisions of the DMCA.
6. If YouTube’s entire user base were turned into a Country, it would be the third largest
Country by population in the world, behind China and India. It’s population would be
larger than all the Countries in Europe combined, and depending on how much YouTube has grown
since they last released statistics, it’s population could be larger than all of Africa.
5. In 2006 YouTube was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion. At the time of its acquisition,
YouTube was haemorrhaging money at a rate of $500,000 per month. However, Google saw
YouTube’s immense advertising potential and has since then turned YouTube into a global
success, and today nearly 1 out of every 2 internet users are on YouTube.
4. YouTube is the world’s most popular video sharing site, no questions there. But more
than that, YouTube is also the world’s second largest search engine, with only Google in
front. In fact, it’s larger than Bing, Yahoo! And Ask and AOL combined. It processes more
than 3 billion searches every month,
3. The most viewed video on YouTube has always been a highly coveted spot, and one that hasn’t
changed as many times as some may think. The first and one of the best known viral videos
from the early days of YouTube is the Evolution of Dance, uploaded on April 6th 2006. It held
the record for most viewed video until mid-2008 when Avril Lavigne’s “Girlfriend” music
video took the number 1 spot. Since then it’s been mostly dominated by various music videos
apart from a few exceptions like “Charlie bit my finger” but in July 2012, Psy released
his “Gangnam Style” music video which took YouTube by storm. It was the first YouTube
video to surpass 1 billion views, and as of today has over 2.2 billion views, meaning
if the views were unique, nearly 30% of the Earth’s population would have seen the video.
2. YouTube likes to play a prank on us every
now and again. Since 2008 they’ve been pulling various tricks on their users on the 1st of
April as part of April Fools. In 2008, they changed all of the links to
the videos on their main page to redirect to the popular music video “Never Gonna
Give You Up” by Rick Astley, a prank that’s become well known on the internet as “Rickrolling”
In 2009, whenever you clicked on a video on the main page, the entire page would turn
upside down – which YouTube claimed was part of their “new layout”
In 2012, clicking on the image of a DVD next to the site logo led to a video about “The
YouTube Collection”, an option to order every single YouTube video for home delivery
on DVD, VideoCassette, Laserdisc or Betamax tapes, yes, you heard that right, Betamax
tapes.
1. YouTube was initially started in Chad Hurley’s garage. In 2006, they were able to move to
an office space above a pizza place in California, where they hired YouTube’s first employees,
around 20 people. Hurley was chief executive officer and Chen was made chief technology
officer. Karim acted as an advisor. Karim would soon leave for a graduate program in
computer science at Stanford University.
Bonus Statistics Round:
• Every day, people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions
of views • The number of hours people are watching
on YouTube each month is up 50% year on year • ~60% of a creator’s views come from
outside their home country • YouTube is localised in 75 countries and
available in 61 languages • Half of YouTube views are on mobile devices
• Mobile revenue on YouTube is up over 100% y/y
• On average, there are more than 400 tweets per minute contain a YouTube link