YouTube’s 10th birthday, relive key moments in internet history. Back in 2005, most of the most popular sites and services today were getting started. Facebook was only a year old, Myspace and Friendster were fending off new competitors after launching in 2005 and Bebo would launch in July 2005 – all of which would eventually fade into obscurity or die out entirely.
February 14, 2015, marks the ten-year anniversary of YouTube.com the most-visited video sharing website world wide. YouTube was founded by three of PayPal’s earliest employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim were the masterminds behind the site and spent months building it before the first public preview in May 2005. The site made its official debut later that year.
The First Video Uploaded to YouTube April 23, 2005
You Tube Stats 2015:
When Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006, many people were wondering if the search giant had wildly overpaid for the site. Today, the website is said to be valued as high as $40 billion.
- 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
- ~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 on mobile devices
- Mobile revenue on YouTube is up over 100% y/y
- 85% of YouTube TrueView in-stream ads are skippable
- 45% of online users who posted an original video in 2013 uploaded one involving a pet or animal.
Roughly 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.
In November 2014, a Google spokesperson confirmed that number had jumped to 300 hours, or roughly 12.5 days’ worth of video, per minute.
PewDiePie boasts the most-subscribed channel at over 34.5 million subscribers, and that Psy’s “Gangnam Style” music video is the most-viewed clip of all time at more than 2.2 billion views.