It was created in 2005 by three of the guys who helped start up PayPal. Steven Chen, Jawed Karim and Chad Hurley knew each other from working at PayPal, and YouTube was first founded from bonuses from eBay buying out PayPal. No PayPal bonuses, no Youtube?
The first video ever uploaded to Youtube was one of the founders, Jawed Karim, talking about elephants in a zoo for 18 seconds.
One of the highest paid youtubers, DC Toys Collector, has a very odd and bizarrely soothing channel. Remember the joy of opening a new toy when you were a child? DC Toys Collector makes videos of just that and is so popular that they have over 9 MILLION subscribers. In 2014, it is estimated that they made over 4 million dollars...just by recording themselves opening toys and describing them.
In 2015, according to YouTube, Americans had watched over 600 MILLION hours of beauty videos. YouTube and beauty gurus have not only taught countless women and men how to up their makeup game, they've become a cultural phenomenon in their own right.
There are several ways people make money on YouTube: Putting ads in front of videos; having videos sponsored, or having a patreon account where people can support you and your content either monthly or every time you put out a video. Patreon allows people to support artists and content creators directly, instead of supporting their sponsors.
People are very curious about how much people make on YouTube. While we've heard about this or that YouTuber who's made millions, the specific number has very much to do with the specific contract signed with AdSense (how youtubers get paid from ads) and several other factors, so one no knows for sure. However, there is a website, called SocialBlade, that can give you estimates if you're REALLY curious.
Over 80% of YouTube's views are NOT from the United States; however, YouTube is pretty quiet about which countries do account for most of their views.
YouTube has actually created very fancy production spaces called YouTube Space in New York, LA, Toronto, and London where creators can find resources. To actually use the facility in LA to record and produce, you need a minimum of 10,000 subscribers, no copyright strikes against your channel, be over 18, and it cannot be a video for a specific consumer brand unless they're a YouTube brand partner.
Each month on YouTube, over 4 billion hours of video - that's almost half a million year's worth - are viewed. That's every 30 days. Which sounds crazy until you remember that over a decade's worth of content is uploaded to YouTube daily.
The most disliked video in YouTube history is Justin' Beiber's "Baby," which, at the time of this writing, is sitting at 7,609,589 dislikes, to only 6,336,078 likes. Irony: The beibs was discovered on YouTube. Like, baby, baby, baby, no!
If you're ever stuck with a youtube video buffering, press any arrow key and you can play snake, much like you can play a dinosaur game on google's homepage when the internet is down. Who needs to wait for your little magic box to load a video from across the world? Here's a game to distract you while you're waiting to be distracted.
You can navigate/comment/view YouTube's website in over 75 languages, which means YouTube is accessible (linguistically, at least) to 95% of the world's population.
It would take between 60,000 and 95,000 years to watch every video on YouTube, depending on how you calculate that. Keep in mind that number is constantly growing, and there are hundreds of live streams at any given time. That's a lot of cats, contouring, and let's plays.
In 2014, Grumpy Cat earned more money via YouTube than Gwyneth Paltrow did that year being...Gwyneth Paltorw.
Perhaps the most well known internet practical joke is the "Rickroll," which involves giving someone a link to something else that turns out to be the Rick Astley song "Never Gonna Give You Up." It started in 2007, and that year Astley himself even Rickrolled the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Rickrolling still happens, a decade later.
Mobile users account for over half of YouTube's views. That dude in his 20's on the bus watching a video with headphones? This is as normal or more normal than watching cable TV for many Americans in his age range now.
Though the reasons vary from scandal and sexual content to politics (let's be honest, it's usually politics), ten countries have banned YouTube at one point or another: Brazil, Turkey, Germany, Libya, Thailand, Turkmenistan, China, North Korea, Iran, and Pakistan. Before Americans get all high and mighty though, know that many countries, including the US, have asked for political videos to be removed or censored at some point.
The cats on the internet jokes aren't really jokes, considering that in 2013, 45% of Americans who uploaded a video to YouTube, uploaded one of their pet. Before you get judgmental about that, consider that people watch videos of other people's cats, so there's a fair market demand.
After Google, YouTube is the second most-used search engine on the internet. Sorry Bing! If you want to learn about something, videos are one of the best ways to learn.
The first YouTube office was located above a pizza joint in San Mateo, California.
A YouTube channel can have three copyright strikes before the account is suspended and all videos deleted. However, there's some controversy over this as companies such as Viacom have sued YouTube claiming they aren't doing enough to stop Copyright Infringement. On the other hand, content creators often claim they receive strikes before YouTube does any sort of investigation, and for things that are covered under fair use, such as short clips.
Cable is losing to YouTube, at least in the 18-49 year old age demographic, as they reach more people in this age range than ANY cable channel in the United States.
Over 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute (worldwide).
Most people know that the music video for Psy's Gangnam Style has the most YouTube views ever (as of this writing, it's sitting at 2,825,243,980 views). What most people don't know is that YouTube has a hard play count limit, which has to quickly be raised in order for "Gangnam Style" to not reach its limit of plays. It's now set at 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 plays, so we're good for a bit.
Facebook still wins, at least domestically. Despite the fact that Facebook performs social experiments on it's users, over 2/3 of Americans are on Facebook, while just over 63% are on YouTube.
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