YouTube Facts

YouTube is the largest video hosting website on the internet, each minute a total of 100 hours of video are added to the site. Which equates to 250 days’ worth of video each hour and a staggering 16.4 years of video each and every day. Ultimately this means that every year a grand total of six millennia of video is added to the video sharing platform. Of these videos, Facebook users watch over 150 years’ worth each day. On Twitter, over 700 YouTube videos are shared each minute. Collected beneath are a number of other interesting YouTube facts.

YouTube Facts: It probably wouldn’t exist without Janet Jackson

Back in 2004, Jawed Karim became intrigued by the viral nature of Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction, where the pop icon accidentally displayed her right nipple to the press cameras of the world. However he was unable to find a place where he could either view or share the video on the internet. This and a number of other factors lead Karim and his other co-founders to create a video hosting platform instead of the video dating site they had initially intended to create.

YouTube Facts: It was founded by former PayPal employees

Each of the video sharing network’s three co-founders, Jawed Karim, Steven Chen and Chad Hurley worked at PayPal prior to setting up YouTube. The domain name was registered in February 2005 and the site was officially launched in December of that year.

YouTube Facts: 60% of the 1000 most popular YouTube videos are banned in Germany

The German music licensing company Gemma blocks over 60% of the 1000 most popular YouTube videos. These videos are blocked in Germany due to the fact that they contain copyrighted music. The majority of the blocked videos are official music videos by globally leading artists including Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Justin Bieber and Eminem. The block also means that German’s are unable to access the official video for PSY’s incredibly famous Gangnam Style.

• The majority of YouTube views are from outside the U.S.

• YouTube video views in the United States of America only account for 20% of total video views on the video sharing platform.

•  More than one million advertisers use YouTube via Google ad platforms, the majority of these are small businesses.

•  A number of channels are making money on YouTube, thousands of which are earning more than six figures a year.

•  More than one million video creators from over 30 different countries are earning a living creating from their YouTube videos.

•  Over half of all YouTube videos have been rated or have been commented on by members of the video sharing platform’s network.

•  YouTube is available in 61 languages and has been localised to the same number of countries globally.

•  Nearly 40% of all of YouTube’s watch time is accumulated through mobile views.

•  YouTube is bigger than Bing, Ask and Yahoo! combined, it is the second largest search engine on the internet.

•  On average a visitor to YouTube spends between 20 and 25 minutes on the site each visit.

•  Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.6 billion in stocks:

Just 18 months after its creation, October 2006, Google bought YouTube. The search engine paid $1.6 billion in stocks. Steven Chen received $310 million, Chad Hurley received $334 million and Jawed Karim received $66 million.

YouTube Facts: Researchers Attribute YouTube’s Success to four factors

The success of YouTube has been reduced by researchers to four key factors. These are as follows:

• An email link to enable video sharing.
• Comments and other social networking features.
• The embeddable video player.
• Video recommendations, which are received via the “related videos” list.