Everyone is aware of the popular website ‘YouTube’. As of January 2021, there are approx. 34.6 billion visitors, which makes it the second most visited website in the world. It helps to host millions of videos and helps Google earn billions by its ad revenue.
YouTube was founded in 2005 by formal PayPal employees-Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. Within 1.5-year Google bought it for $1.65 billion. As per the founders, the idea of YouTube was born at a dinner party in 2004, the founders found it very frustrating when they struggled to find a controversial video on the Net. Moreover, they also found it difficult to share a large video file with others. Because of this, the founders had an amazing idea of launching a platform that can help to create, upload and share videos easily.
Be it entertainment, tutorials, or music, YouTube is our go-to option for everything. But am sure you don’t know the following things that you will read in this article.
1) YouTube started as a dating site
The original intention of YouTube was to focus on dating. They aimed to design it in a way that will allow people to upload their videos in which they would describe what they want in their partner.
The website faced utter failure as no one in the first five days of its launch uploaded anything on it. The founders then decided to make it open for uploading any sort of video. The very first official video is by one of the founders Jawed Karim – ‘Me at the Zoo’. The video is still on YouTube and has around 166 million views as of May 2021.
2) YouTube is blocked in a few countries
YouTube is blocked in – China, Iran, Turkmenistan, South Sudan, Sudan, Tajikistan, Syria, North Korea, Eritrea. All these countries had their reasons to block it, China has blocked YouTube Since 2009, it has its local website Youku for video uploads. Other countries had placed the ban stating the sensitive religious content which violates social and moral code of conduct and causes mass unrest.
3) Video with highest views
It is no brainer that the commercial music videos will be the one into billion view club. But you will be amazed to know that the billion viewed videos are on some of the children’s programs. Before October 2020 the music video ‘Despacito’ was the most viewed, but in November 2020 it was surpassed by the children’s song ‘Baby Shark’ posted by Pinkfong. As of now, the video has over 8.5 billion views.
4) Most Subscribed YouTube Channel
As of now, our Indian music network ‘T- series has the most subscribers in the world- currently, it has around 182 million subscribers. The second most subscribed channel is of a Swedish video game commentator- PewDiePie. He currently has over 110 million subscribers.
5) Highest Paid YouTuber of 2020
Ryan Kaji tops Forbes’s highest-paid YouTuber list with $29.5 million in earnings. His channel name is Ryan’s world. Ryan is a 9-year-old kid and he unboxes toys, games and reviews them. The channel usually releases a new video every day. This channel is also available in Spanish and Japanese. Kaji has hugely influenced the toy industry. His toy review with million views does affect the sale of toys in drastic figures.
6) The time when the YouTube View limit broke
We all remember the famous music video by Psy – Gangnam style. Although it’s a Korean song the peppy beats and odd dance moves made it popular all over the world. YouTube’s counter previously used a 32-bit integer, which means the maximum possible views it could count was 2,147,483,647. But when Gangnam-style video crossed the views, YouTube had to increase the view limit counter.
Now they have a view limit of 9.22 quintillion. It’s a huge number considering – one thousand trillion makes one quintillion.
7) YouTube is available in 80 languages
YouTube is available in over 100 countries and it is localized into 80 different languages. It is a great marketing strategy that has helped in boosting the number of users on the website. YouTube provides language and content preferences for all users for ease of use.
An international brand can market itself very well on YouTube if they plan to post content in different languages. Reaching various demographics via one website makes it a very powerful video marketing tool.
8) When did monetization start?
Nowadays we see a massive boom of YouTubers, many youngsters are keen on pursuing this career option and are also able to earn well from it. All thanks to YouTube’s Partner Program and Google’s AdSense. This partner program was launched in May 2007.
You will be amazed to know that a simple 56-sec video of a toddler named Charlie bitten by his brother became viral in 2007. Due to monetization, the family of those kids has earned more than $100000.
Earning from YouTube is altogether a big topic to discuss, let me know in the comments if you wish to know more about it.
9) The launch of YouTube Live
Be it live news, a debate, or a sports event, we all love to watch Live videos. But the feature of YouTube Live has added a decade ago, it was not the feature from the beginning of the website. YouTube Live feature became active in April 2011. This function enables creators and organizations to stream live content.
10) The country with the highest web traffic
According to the data from Alexa’s estimates, 16.4% of YouTube’s site traffic comes from the U.S. YouTube is also very popular in India and accounts for around 9.3% of traffic. Japan contributes around 4.9% of the traffic to YouTube.
As per Statista.com, YouTube’s worldwide advertising revenues were around 6.89 billion U.S. dollars in the last quarter of 2020, which is near to a 46 percent year-over-year increase. With content creators increasing day by day, YouTube surely has a bright future ahead.
The above 10 things showed that YouTube’s dominance and market penetration is massive and it won’t fade away so soon.
Image Credits : Pixabay, Unsplash
Ajay Rathod
Hi!! I am Ajay, and I’m a passionate blogger who loves to write about a variety of topics. I’m always eager to explore new ideas and share my thoughts with others.