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YouTube is 10 Years Old! Here’s A Brief History of World’s Favourite Video Service
Today is YouTube’s 10th Anniversary. Yep, 10 solid years. Here’s a selection of interesting facts to celebrate
The list of websites that most people would say makes the Internet the great resource of knowledge it is if you were to ask them on the street is pretty short. They’d say Google. They’d say Wikipedia. And then they’d most certainly say YouTube. It’s the site we turn to for serious entertainment and serious news. The site we turn to to see endless cat videos and the latest music videos. It’s a site which without the Internet would feel like a very different place.
“300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Not all of it is worth watching but enough of it is that you won’t live long enough to see it all,” notes The Guardian. “And there’s more to it than watching. Online video can engage people in many ways. Some of these are engineered, such as ‘liking’ or leaving a comment, and others entirely unexpected, like the YouTube-inspired servers for Minecraft. Plenty of offline occurrences spring from the uploading of a video, from massive conventions to familial reunions.”
YouTube was founded ten years ago on Valentines Day, February 14, 2005. Since then it regularly ranks in the top three sites visited worldwide (the other two are Google and Facebook). There have been many competitors and imitators that have cropped up since, but none of them had the draw or staying power of the site that can give you your fifteen minutes of fame again and again and again. So in honor of its first decade of existence we look back at some interesting facts about the internet’s most beloved video site.
It wasn’t always owned by Google
Everyone knows that Google owns YouTube, but many people–especially teenagers today–might not know that Google didn’t invent, nor always own YouTube. YouTube was actually founded by three friends who were ex-PayPal employees: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. A little more than a year and a half later Google would buy YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock–an astronomical sum at the time, but one which ended up being a great deal for Google given how popular the site has become.
No one can agree on why they got the idea for the site
Most founders can tell you what the inspiration for their invention was, but the founders of YouTube don’t agree. Hurley and Chen assert that they conceived of YouTube in early 2005 when they realized there was no easy way to share a video online that they had shot at a dinner party at their apartment.
But the third founder, Jawed Karim, has said that’s not the real story–rather it’s one created for marketing purposes. Karim says the idea for YouTube came about when he couldn’t easily find video clips of Janet Jackson’s 2004 Super Bowl “wardrobe malfunction” and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami to view online.
YouTube could have been a dating site
Hurley and Chen also say that one early idea for YouTube involved using it as a dating site. This suggests that the site would have allowed people to upload video profiles in order to meet online daters.
Though the site was founded on Valentines Day, the first video wasn’t uploaded until April
Though the founders activated the domain www.youtube.com on February 14, 2005 the first video wasn’t actually uploaded until April 23, 2005. It’s titled Me at the zoo and features YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo.
YouTube opened to the public in May 2005
Even after Me at the zoo was uploaded by Karim, YouTube wasn’t made available to the public until May 2005 when a public beta was launched. The site officially launched in November 2005. By July 2006 the site was getting 65,000 new videos uploaded to it every day, according to Wikipedia.
With that kind of traffic and content, it made YouTube the target of large tech money. Google snapped the company up for $1.65 billion just 11 months after its official launch.
The most watched video is….
Though Me at the zoo was the first video uploaded–and it has an impressive number of views (over 17 million)–it’s by far not the most watched video. That title goes to the music video “Gangnam Style” by Psy. It has 2.23 billion views to date. The distant second place video has “only” 1.13 billion views. That’s Justin Biber’s “Baby”.
People love pet videos
This may come as a shock to no one, but according to a Pew Research Center report 31% of online adults have posted a video on YouTube and 45% of those posted a video of their pet or an animal, with cats being more popular than dogs.
YouTube has some crazy stats
It’s not the #3 most visited website on the Internet for no reason. Check out these stats from YouTube and Pew Research:
- YouTube has more than 1 billion users
- 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 over year
- 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
- Around 60% of a creator’s views comes from outside their home country
- YouTube is localized in 75 countries and available in 61 languages
- Half of YouTube views are now on mobile devices
- YouTube is the world’s second largest social networking site, behind Facebook
- 82% of 18- to 29-year-olds used YouTube in 2014
- 76% of blacks and 74% of Hispanics use YouTube, way more than the 57% of whites.
Happy Birthday YouTube! Here’s to the next decade!
Michael Grothaus
14:45, 13 Feb 2015