YouTube was created by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim in 2005 who were all employees of Paypal
YouTube was initially funded by bonuses received following the eBay buy-out of PayPal
The founding trio didn’t come up with the YouTube concept straight away. Legend has it that YouTube began life as a video dating site dubbed “Tune In Hook Up,” said to be influenced by HotorNot. The three ultimately decided not to go that route
The inspiration for YouTube as we know it today is credited to two different events. The first was Karim’s inability to find footage online of Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction,” and the second when Hurley and Chen were unable to share video footage of a dinner party due to e-mail attachment limitations
The domain name YouTube.com was registered on Valentine’s Day in 2005
Google’s auto speech recognition technology translates 51 languages including captions
The longest Video ever on YouTube is 48 hours (2 days!)
The ‘how to’ video category is the fastest growing vertical on YouTube
YouTube has 490 million users worldwide (unique visitors per month)
It generates an estimated 92 billion page views each month.
The average YouTube user visits the site 14 times per month
The average user spends an average of 25 minutes on the site each time they visit.
The average user spends 5 hours and 50 minutes per month (not as much as Facebook)
Together, we spend 2.9 billion hours on YouTube in a month. That’s 326,294 years.
More than 13 million hours of video were uploaded during 2010 and 35 hours of video are uploaded every minute.
70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the US
YouTube is localized in 25 countries across 43 languages
YouTube’s demographic is broad: 18-54 years old
YouTube reached over 700 billion playbacks in 2010.
