A creation of Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, YouTube has revolutionised the way we consume video. It gave anyone with an Internet connection a quick and convenient way to find, watch and share anything caught on camera. It has influenced culture, education and even politics.
According to Alexa, YouTube is the third most visited website on the Internet, behind only Google and Facebook.
YouTube’s first office was located above a pizzeria in San Mateo, California. By 2006, the website was generating 100 million video views per day, but it had trouble monetising all those hits. That’s when Google came along, offering the trio $1.65 billion for the company that wasn’t making any money. In hindsight, Chen, Hurley and Karim should have asked for more.
500 years worth of YouTube video is watched every day on Facebook, and over 700 years are shared on Twitter each minute. As for uploading, every passing minute results in 72 hours of video hosted on the site.
Clicks on the ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ buttons on YouTube have doubled since the start of 2011. For every ‘dislike,’ the site gets 10 ‘likes’- apparently people like to tell other people about the stuff they love. Over a million advertisers are using Google ad platforms on the site, the majority of which are small businesses.
Earlier this year, Hurley told TechWeekEurope that he was simply lucky to be at the right place at the right time. You can watch our interview with him here. And if you want to test your knowledge,
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