Youtube is the world’s second largest search engine with over 1.9 billion unique visitors per month. This platform renders over 1 billion hours of videos a day which is more than Netflix and Facebook video combined. This dating website launched by three former PayPal employees on a Valentine’s day rules the internet today. Let us see a few interesting facts about Youtube that are really worth reading.
1) First YouTube video
Today about 300 hours of video are uploaded to youtube every minute. The first video ever uploaded to youtube was “Me at the Zoo”.This was uploaded on April 23, 2005, by Jawed Karim who also happens to be the co-founder of youtube. This was a 19-second video shot at San Diego Zoo by a friend of Karim featuring him in front of elephants.[Source]
2) Gangnam style broke YouTube
The engineers at youtube would have never thought that a South Korean pop star would one day break their site, but it actually happened. The popularity of the “Gangnam Style” video by Psy actually broke the view counter of youtube.
While designing the site, the programmers at youtube used a 32-bit integer to store the number of views associated with a video. The maximum value that such an integer could hold is 2,147,483,647. But this video was so popular that it surpassed that count.Currently this video clocks 3,316,723,185 views.The programmers had to modify the counter variable to a 64-bit number to accommodate the change. Now the techies’at youtube can relax until another video breaks the counter by crossing 9 quintillion views or 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 to be precise.[Source]
3) Landlady became the CEO of YouTube
Susan Wojcicki rented her garage to Larry Page and Sergey Brin while they were working on starting their dream company.
Image Credit: Google Maps
Later she became an employee of Google and was Google’s first marketing manager. Now she is the CEO of youtube. Sergey Brin married Susan’s sister Anne Wojcicki in 2007.[Source]
4) One in two internet user across the world visits YouTube
Localized versions of Youtube are available in 90 countries and 90 different languages. All of these account for more than1.9 billion unique YouTube users each month and over a billion hours of video a single day.[Source]
5) The longest video on YouTube has a duration of 23 days
Jonathan Harchick created the longest video with a duration of 571 hours, 1 minute, and 41 seconds. This video is actually a slide show of the pictures from his Chile visit. The pictures on this video appear blurry because he actually compressed the video so that it could fit into youtube’s limit of 20 gigabytes.[Source]
6) YouTube caused problems for UTube
When the domain youtube.com has launched the folks at Universal Tube& Rollform Equipment company never imagined that it was going to a nightmare for them. This company already had a domain utube.com for their official site. As the two names were phonetically same the Rollform company website started receiving inadvertent hits from web users trying to access youtube. In the month of August 2006, the company website received about 68 million false visits which skyrocketed their website maintenance cost. They had also filed a lawsuit in the US District Court regarding this issue. Later the firm renamed their domain to utubeonline.com to resolve the issue.[Source]
7) YouTube has production spaces across the world
Youtube has set up production facilities across cities like Newyork, London, Berlin, Mumbai, and Dubai to help it’s content creators generate awesome content.
Image Credit: Youtube
All youtube channel owners with over 18 years of age and has more than 10000 subscribers can use this facility for free.[Source]
8) YouTube itself created the most disliked video
Youtube Rewind 2018 is the most disliked video on youtube with about 15 million dislikes. Rewind series published on the 6th of December every year is produced by Youtube and is mostly a recap of that year’s viral videos, events, and trends.2018 Rewind series was also much criticized for ignoring popular youtube content creators like PewDiePie and Shane Dawson.[Source]
9) Most popular YouTube channel has 91 million subscribers
PEWDIEPIE is the most popular youtube channel with about 91,351,089 subscribers. This channel was created in 2010 by Felix Arvid Ulf Kjellberg who is a Swedish YouTuber, comedian and video game player. This youtube channel mainly features “Let’s Play” videos and blogs.[Source]
10) Google bought YouTube for US$1.65 billion in stocks.
Three former employees of PayPal Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim founded youtube on February 14, 2005. Just 18 months after its launch Google acquired youtube for a whopping sum of $1.65 billion. At this time youtube had nearly 50 million users worldwide. Google has proved that the decision to acquire youtube was perfect as youtube currently boast of 1.9 billion registered users and annual revenue of $15 billion.[Source]
11) At YouTube’s headquarters employees can take a big slide
Google is famous for its innovative concepts at their office premises be it the Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton at their campus or the use of goats instead of lawn mowers. Similarly, Youtube headquarters also has some cool concepts. There is a big slide that can be used by employees to get to the second floor in addition to stairs and escalators.[Source]
12) YouTube originally wanted to play cupid.
The founders of youtube started this as a dating platform on Valentine’s day. The website was originally destined to be a dating site which was designed for singles to upload short videos about themselves in order to do matchmaking. But this idea could not attract even a single visitor after some days of its launch. So they improvised their basic idea and transformed youtube to what it is today.[Source]
13) YouTube pays a royalty fee for each view in Germany
Germany has been banning youtube videos with copyrighted music content for many years even if the music has been used as the background. In 2016 Youtube has signed an agreement with GEMA a government based firm enabling the music content owners to receive a royalty fee every time their content is viewed.[Source]
14) YouTube’ s first headquarters was not at all plush
Currently, youtube has its corporate headquarters in San Bruno, California with 2.3 million square feet of office space. But the first headquarters of youtube was a just small space in San Mateo above a pizzeria and a Japanese restaurant.[Source]
Image Credit: Wikipedia
15) “Charlie Bit My Finger” has over 867 million views and 1.9 million likes.
Charlie Bit my Finger is the most viewed amateur YouTube video. This is a video featuring a baby biting the fingers of his brother. This video was shot by Howard Davies-Carr who is the father of these kids. He had shared this video on youtube because he could not attach it via email to share with his family members due to its size.
Furthermore, this video has generated a revenue of nearly £1 million in royalties until now.[Source]
Leave a Comment