YouTube is the popular video sharing platform and an important part of our daily life. Initially, people started using YouTube just for entertainment. Now with a publisher program, various video bloggers are earning good full time income. Today is the 10th anniversary of this popular video sharing platform. So, I decided to research on the history of YouTube and share few interesting facts about YouTube.
18 YouTube Facts That You Should Know
1. PayPal gave birth to YouTube
Heading will surprise you but it is true. PayPal was the place where all three YouTube founders (Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim.) met and decided to start YouTube. All three founders were the employees at Paypal where they started on YouTube.
2. Initial Funds for YouTube
I already mentioned that YouTube was created by PayPal employee. They received bonuses when ebay bough Paypal. They used the bonus received to invest in their next idea.
3. YouTube.com was registered on Valentine’s Day in 2005
The domain name YouTube.com was registered on Valentine’s Day in 2005. And it all started.
4. How YouTube was born?
Idea for YouTube came in minds of founders at a dinner party at Steve Chen’s place in San Francisco. Hurley and Chen were trying to share videos of party night but couldn’t due to some email attachment error. Karim also faced problem when he was searching the videos of Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction.” These two problems gave an idea to form a new video based startup.
5. Original idea for YouTube
Initially YouTube was not a video sharing platform. It was meant to be a dating website dubbed “Tune In Hook Up” which was inspired by HotorNot. Later they decided to change the route.
6. Official Launch and initial growth
YouTube started public beta test of the website in May 2005 and officially launched in November 2005. In next 9 months, YouTube grew to 65000 new videos upload daily on the video sharing platform with 100 million video views per day.
7. First video
First video of YouTube was uploaded in April 23, 2005 by one of the co-founders Jawed karim. He uploaded a video of his visit to the San diego Zoom. This vide was titled as “me at zoo” in which karim talked about elephant’s trunks.
8. Domain name misunderstanding and Youtube caused problems for Utube
Domain name YouTube.com created huge misunderstanding for Universal Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment based in Perrysburg, Ohio. This company owns domain utube.com. This site’s owner files a lawsuit against YouTube in November 2006 after being overloaded by people who were trying to type YouTube.com phonetically. Later, Universal Tube changed the name of its website to www.utubeonline.com to avoid the misunderstanding.
9. Grabbed by Google
In November 2006, Google acquired this video sharing platform for huge $1.65 billion. It was a big success for founders to sell the 1 year old startup for this much amount.
10. April fool’s day prank
Since 2008, YouTube has started April fool’s day pranks. First prank video was “Rickrolling” in which all homepage videos were redirected to Rick Astley’s music video “Never Gonna Give You Up”.
11. Most Viewed Music Video of All Time
Most viewed music video on YouTube of all time is PSYs’s Gangnam style. It has around 2.2 billion YouTube videos.
12. YouTube Statistics
YouTube gas more than 1 billion active users. Daily people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of video videos. Every minute, 300 hours of videos are uploaded on YouTube. YouTube us available in more than 61 different languages. Half of YouTube views comes from mobile devices.
13. Advertisers data
Google has more than a million advertisers which are promoting their business on YouTube.
14. Time needed to watch all videos on YouTube
It is said that it will take more than 2000 years to watch all the videos available on YouTube.
15. YouTube is second largest search engine
YouTube is not only a video sharing platform. It is also the second largest search engine after Google (bigger than Bing, Yahoo!, and Ask combined).
16. YouTube is much bigger than TV networks
YouTube is now bigger than most popular television networks. As per the reports, more video content is uploaded to YouTube in 60 days than the three major U.S. television networks created in 60 years. And the data on YouTube is increasing day by day.
17. Third Most popular website
According to Alexa, YouTube is the third most popular website on Internet after Google and Facebook.
18. High Definition content
YouTube has more HD (High definition) content than any other online video site.
Also read:
10 Interesting Facts About Intel
12 Less Known Facts About Google
