YouTube was officially founded on Feb. 14, 2005. The startup’s first office was located above a pizzeria and a Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, Calif. YouTube’s other co-founder, Jawed Karim, uploaded “Me at the Zoo” on April 23. That video clip, which lasts just 18 seconds, has been viewed more than 302 million times. After moving to San Bruno, Calif., the startup received its first venture funding, $11.5 million, from Sequoia in November 2005.
YouTube grew quickly, with users posting 65,000 new movies daily and offering 100 million video views daily by the middle of 2006. Recognizing the platform’s immense potential, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in November 2006, giving Sequoia a 43x return on its seed investment.
This acquisition gave YouTube the financial backing and infrastructure needed to scale its operations globally. Google integrated YouTube into its broader ecosystem, enhancing search capabilities and monetization through Google AdSense. Besides Google’s vast resources, YouTube’s explosive growth was driven by several factors:
- Ease of use – YouTube’s simple interface allowed users to upload, share, and view videos easily, fostering a rapidly expanding community.
- Free access – The platform offered free access to an ever-growing library of content, attracting a wide audience.
- Embedded sharing – YouTube’s ability to embed videos on other websites and blogs enabled content to spread quickly across the internet.
Viewing Dimensions
Using the slogan “Broadcast Yourself,” YouTube has experienced exponential growth. YouTube currently ranks as the second most visited site worldwide. The only site to receive more traffic is that of its parent company, Google. YouTube’s explosive growth can be tracked using these vital statistics:
- Active users – According to Global Media Insight, YouTube boasts 2.7 billion monthly active users as of August 2024. The chart below reflects a variety of data sources compiled by Backlinko (Semrush), resulting in non-comparable methodologies:
- Daily video views – On Oct. 9, 2009, Chad Hurley announced that YouTube was serving “ well over a billion views a day” worldwide. On its fifth anniversary, May 17, 2010, YouTube announced that video views exceeded 2 billion each day, a doubling of site traffic in six months. On Jan. 23, 2012, YouTube announced it had reached 4 billion daily video views. While the company has offered no further general daily video view updates, it does now claim a staggering 70 billion daily views of YouTube Shorts.
- Video content uploaded – On May 25, 2011, YouTube announced that 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, up from 24 hours in March 2010 and 15 hours in January 2010. At the 2015 Vidcon conference, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said the figure was 400 hours. The current figure is 500 hours of content uploaded per minute. The chart below was compiled by Statista:
- Time spent – In 2011, comScore reported that people spent an average of just 10 minutes each day on YouTube. According to BroadbandSearch, time spent has nearly doubled to 19 minutes each day.
Based on its current global daily delivery of 4 billion video views, YouTube’s viewership is more than double the prime-time audience of all three major U.S. television networks, ABC, CBS and NBC, combined, as YouTube postulated in May 2010 with just 2 billion views.
Creator Economy
According to a 2023 Pew Research Center study, YouTube is a top social network based on the 83% of U.S. adults who say they ever use it.
That high user penetration, combined with the over 1 billion hours of video watched daily, makes YouTube not only the most visited video platform globally but also the platform of choice for creators. At 2015’s Vidcon, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki noted that 8 of the top 10 celebrity influencers were YouTubers.
YouTube has been instrumental in the rise of the creator economy, where individuals build businesses and personal brands through content creation. YouTube has carved out a unique niche in the digital landscape by becoming the go-to platform for user-generated content across a wide range of categories, including:
- Entertainment – Music videos, movie trailers, and short films quickly found a home on YouTube, drawing in massive audiences. Who can forget such viral music videos as Psy’s “Gangnam Style” (featured image), which premiered on YouTube on July 15, 2012, and set a record on Dec. 21, 2012, as the first video to surpass 1 billion views on YouTube. Or Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito,” which broke music video viewership records, with 8.5 billion views. Of course, nothing beats the Baby Shark Dance, which has amassed a staggering 14 billion views:
- Education – The platform has become a valuable resource for educational content, with tutorials, lectures, and how-to videos. The immersive capabilities of video make it a compelling medium for both education and training.
- Vlogs and personal content – YouTube enables users to share their lives through vlogs (video blogs), creating a new form of personal storytelling.
- Niche communities – From gaming to beauty, cooking to fitness, YouTube caters to diverse interests, allowing creators to connect with like-minded audiences.
YouTube quickly became an integral part of pop consumer culture, when on Apr. 1, 2008, all links on its main page were redirected to Rick Astley’s music video “Never Gonna Give You Up.” This prank was so widely repeated that it became known as “Rickrolling.”
YouTube has been Rickrolling to the bank ever since. In 2023, the social video network generated $31.5 billion for Alphabet.
Ubertrends: Voyeurgasm, Digital Lifestyle
