YouTube has changed the way we watch and shared videos so I thought that I would collate some fun facts about YouTube for this post.
First off YouTube was created by 3 PayPal employees: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. The site was officially launched in 2005 and this was the first video ever uploaded to it (a video of Jawed at the zoo):
A year later YouTube was purchased by Google for $1.65 billion in stock!
Today more than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month. Over 6 billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube and 100 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.
YouTube is heavily entrenched in any Internet connect person’s life as evidenced by it’s usage on smartphones: 40% of YouTube’s watch time is done on mobile devices and it accounts for 4% of total time spent on iOS and Android devices.
Whilst usage is high amongst the younger generations, 83% of Generation Z visit the site at least once a month, it is used by all: Millennials 70%, Generation X 58%, Younger Baby Boomers 49%, Older Baby Boomers: 40%, Golden Generation: 30%.
Of course this all costs a lot of money to run. In 2007 Google introduced ads to YouTube with a revenue sharing model with owners of video content: 45% to Google, 55% to the uploader. Google doesn’t release any figures but their ad revenue was guesstimated to hit $5.6 billion for 2013. Which means that just over $3 billion went to uploaders, today there are many people who make a living off of the content they upload.
Another mind blowing thing is the number of servers that Google uses to deliver its services such as YouTube. It is estimated that they run over 2.3 million servers!
Here is a video about one of their data centers:
That’s a lot of $$$ for videos of cats ;)
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