YouTube is an American online video-sharing platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. Three former PayPal employees created the service in February 2005. YouTube allows users to upload, view, rate, share, add to playlists, report, comment on videos, and subscribe to other users. Google bought the site in November 2006 for US$1. 65 billion; YouTube now operates as one of Google’s subsidiaries.
About YouTube in brief
YouTube is an American online video-sharing platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. Three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—created the service in February 2005. Google bought the site in November 2006 for US$1. 65 billion; YouTube now operates as one of Google’s subsidiaries. YouTube allows users to upload, view, rate, share, add to playlists, report, comment on videos, and subscribe to other users. Most of the content on YouTube is uploaded by individuals, but media corporations including CBS, the BBC, Vevo, and Hulu offer some of their material via YouTube as part of the YouTube partnership program. As of May 2019, more than 500 hours of video content are uploaded to YouTube every minute. YouTube has faced criticism over aspects of its operations, including its handling of copyrighted content contained within uploaded videos, its recommendation algorithms perpetuating videos that promote conspiracy theories and falsehoods, hosting videos ostensibly targeting children but containing violent or sexually suggestive content involving popular characters, and videos of minors attracting pedophilic activities in their comment sections. Based on reported quarterly advertising revenue, YouTube is estimated to have US$15 billion in annual revenues. The vast majority of its videos are free to view, but there are exceptions, including subscription-based premium channels, film rentals, as well as YouTube Music and YouTube Premium, subscription services respectively offering premium and ad-free music streaming. YouTube began as a venture capital–funded technology startup, primarily an USD 11 million investment by Sequoia Capital and an USD 8 million investment from Artis Management between April 2006 and April 2006.
YouTube’s early headquarters were situated above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California, and the name youtube.com was activated on February 14, 2005. The first YouTube video was a video featuring Ronaldinho featuring Nike in November 2005, and can still be viewed on YouTube today. The site offered a beta test of the site to the public in May 2005, with the first video to reach one million views on November 3, 2005, featuring a Nike advertisement featuring Ronald Ronaldinho. The video was uploaded on April 23, 2005 and can be viewed still on YouTube and canstill be viewed today. As of February 2017, there were more than 400 hours of content uploaded toYouTube each minute, and one billion hours ofcontent being watched on YouTube every day. The inspiration for YouTube first came from Janet Jackson’s role in 2004 Super Bowl incident when her breast was exposed during her performance, and later from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. According to a story that has often been repeated in the media, Hurley and Chen developed the idea for YouTube during the early months of 2005, after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen’s apartment in San Francisco. Hurley had studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
You want to know more about YouTube?
This page is based on the article YouTube published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 17, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
