I FEEL ashamed of myself. I completely forgot that this year is the tenth anniversary of YouTube, the video-sharing website that revolutionized the Internet, enternet, and exchange of information. Yes, the article is somehow late but let’s take time to appreciate this awesome website.
YouTube was founded by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim in 2005. The original idea of the website was for it to be a video version of dating website HOTorNOT. However, it did not push through, Hurley was quoted in Time saying that the idea was “too narrow.”
According to Karim, the creation of the video-sharing website was inspired by Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction during her half-time performance at the 2004 Super Bowl and later on the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. He had difficulty in finding a video of the two events on the internet, this problem led to the development and creation of a video sharing website.
On February 14, 2005, the domain name www.youtube.com was activated. A public beta test for the website was offered in May 2005 and the official launch of YouTube was in November of the same year. On November 2006, the video-sharing website was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion.
“Me at the Zoo” was the first video uploaded on YouTube. The 19 second video, which was uploaded on April 23, 2005, shows Karim talking about elephants at the San Diego Zoo. To date, the video has garnered 25.33 million views.
The first video to reach one million views was the Nike advertisement, “Ronaldinho Touch of Gold”. Justin Bieber’s “Baby” has the most comments on the website with 5.39 million and counting.
Psy’s “Gangnam Style” is, at present, the most watched video on YouTube with over 2.3 billion views and counting. The video was so popular that it broke YouTube’s view counter forcing the company to upgrade it.
To date, Youtube has more than one billion users. Millions of hours are also being watched daily and generating billions of views. Some 300 hours of video are also being uploaded to YouTube every minute. This is a far cry in 2006, where some 65,000 videos are being uploaded every day and receiving 100 million video views per day.
It is also currently the third most visited website in the world and just right behind Google and Facebook. YouTube is also localized in 75 countries and available in 61 languages.
Today, you can find a huge array of videos on YouTube from cartoons to music covers to cooking videos to fail compilations to videos that will play with your emotions. Whoever you are, a video that will fit your interests and needs can be found here.
With YouTube, communities are able to showcase its tourism destinations; teachers are able to make their class more interesting by showing informative and not boring videos; those who love to cook are able to learn new recipes; movie and TV series buffs get the latest information and trailer on new and current movies and TV series; new talents are also discovered and launched to stardom through the website; the list goes on and on.
In 10 years, YouTube has revolutionized the way we seek and access entertainment, exchange and disseminate information, share our talents, market our products, and even as a source of livelihood.
In the next 10 years or so, we can expect more from YouTube. Whatever it may be, you can be assured that it will be something that is innovative and will have a huge social impact to how we do things now.
Happy 10th Anniversary YouTube and continue to be that awesome website you are now! Thank you for a lot things from helping me in class reports to being there every time I’m friendzoned.
To celebrate and reminisce the past 10 years of awesomeness and epicness of YouTube, watch this video:
Web Traveller is my weekly column published every Wednesday in the Chillout section of Sun.Star Davao. YouTube @ 10 was published in Sun.Star Davao on June 22, 2015.