YouTube
YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen, who were former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in San Bruno, California, it is the second-most-visited website in the world, after Google Search. In January 2024, YouTube had more than 2.7 billion monthly active users, who collectively watched more than one billion hours of videos every day. As of May 2019, videos were being uploaded to the platform at a rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute, and as of mid-2024, there were approximately 14.8 billion videos in total.
Through this period, YouTube tried several new ways to generate revenue beyond advertisements.
Quotes
edit- Some have called (YouTube) the biggest and the smallest stage. The most public place in the world, from the privacy from our own homes: YouTube has been used for many things: a political soapbox, a comedian's stage, a religious pulpit, a teacher's podium, or just a way to reach out to the next door neighbor or across the world. To people we love, to people we want to love, or people we don't even know.
- Michael Wesch, “An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube”, presentation to the Library of Congress (23 June 2008).
- We didn't even know how to describe our new product. To generate interest, we just said it was a new kind of dating site. We even had a slogan for it: "Tune in, Hook up." No one did.
