138 Facts About YouTube

YouTube is an American online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California.

Google's ownership of YouTube expanded the site's business model, expanding from generating revenue from advertisements alone, to offering paid content such as movies and exclusive content produced by YouTube.

YouTube approved creators to participate in Google's AdSense program, which seeks to generate more revenue for both parties.

Since its purchase by Google, YouTube has expanded beyond the core website into mobile apps, network television, and the ability to link with other platforms.

Video categories on YouTube include music videos, video clips, news, short films, feature films, documentaries, audio recordings, movie trailers, teasers, live streams, vlogs, and more.

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YouTube has had an unprecedented social impact, influencing popular culture, internet trends, and creating multimillionaire celebrities.

Criticism of YouTube includes the website being used to facilitate the spread of misinformation, copyright issues, routine violations of its users' privacy, enabling censorship, and endangering child safety and wellbeing.

YouTube was founded by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim.

Karim did not attend the party and denied that it had occurred, but Chen remarked that the idea that YouTube was founded after a dinner party "was probably very strengthened by marketing ideas around creating a story that was very digestible".

Hurley and Chen said that the original idea for YouTube was a video version of an online dating service, and had been influenced by the website Hot or Not.

Contrary to popular belief, YouTube was not the first video-sharing site on the Internet; Vimeo was launched in November 2004, though that site remained a side project of its developers from CollegeHumor at the time and did not grow much, either.

Unofficial uploads of the skit to YouTube drew in more than five million collective views by February 2006 before they were removed when NBCUniversal requested it two months later based on copyright concerns.

The Daily Telegraph wrote that in 2007, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000.

Hurley announced that he would be stepping down as a chief executive officer of YouTube to take an advisory role and that Salar Kamangar would take over as head of the company in October 2010.

YouTube officially launched the "polymer" redesign of its user interfaces based on Material Design language as its default, as well a redesigned logo that is built around the service's play button emblem in August 2017.

In 2013, YouTube launched a pilot program for content providers to offer premium, subscription-based channels within the platform.

In 2014, YouTube announced a subscription service known as "Music Key, " which bundled ad-free streaming of music content on YouTube with the existing Google Play Music service.

YouTube released a mobile app known as YouTube Kids in 2015, designed to provide an experience optimized for children.

Also in 2015, YouTube launched YouTube Gaming—a video gaming-oriented vertical and app for videos and live streaming, intended to compete with the Amazon.

YouTube later announced that they would continue with this move worldwide: "We continue to work closely with governments and network operators around the globe to do our part to minimize stress on the system during this unprecedented situation.

YouTube was ordered to create systems to increase children's privacy.

In 2022, YouTube launched an experiment where the company would show users who watched longer videos on TVs a long chain of short unskippable adverts, with a goal of consolidating all ads into the beginning of a video.

YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim referred to the update as "a stupid idea", and that the real reason behind the change was "not a good one, and not one that will be publicly disclosed.

In January 2010, YouTube launched an experimental version of the site that used the built-in multimedia capabilities of web browsers supporting the HTML5 standard.

On January 27, 2015, YouTube announced that HTML5 would be the default playback method on supported browsers.

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YouTube introduced standardized widgets intended to replace annotations in a cross-platform manner, including "end screens".

In 2018, YouTube became an ISNI registry, and announced its intention to begin creating ISNI identifiers to uniquely identify the musicians whose videos it features.

When YouTube was launched in 2005, it was possible to upload longer videos, but a 10-minute limit was introduced in March 2006 after YouTube found that the majority of videos exceeding this length were unauthorized uploads of television shows and films.

YouTube offers manual closed captioning as part of its creator studio.

YouTube formerly offered a 'Community Captions' feature, where viewers could write and submit captions for public display upon approval by the video uploader, but this was deprecated in September 2020.

YouTube accepts the most common container formats, including MP4, Matroska, FLV, AVI, WebM, 3GP, MPEG-PS, and the QuickTime File Format.

In 2018, YouTube added a feature called Premiere which displays a notification to the user mentioning when the video will be available for the first time, like for a live stream but with a prerecorded video.

YouTube originally offered videos at only one quality level, displayed at a resolution of 320×240 pixels using the Sorenson Spark codec, with mono MP3 audio.

In June 2007, YouTube added an option to watch videos in 3GP format on mobile phones.

At the time of the 720p launch, the YouTube player was changed from a 4:3 aspect ratio to a widescreen 16:9.

In July 2010, YouTube announced that it had launched a range of videos in 4K format, which allows a resolution of up to 4096×3072 pixels.

In June 2014, YouTube began to deploy support for high frame rate videos up to 60 frames per second, becoming available for user uploads in October.

YouTube stated that this would enhance "motion-intensive" videos, such as video game footage.

YouTube developed its own chip, called Argos, to help with encoding higher resolution videos in 2021.

In certain cases, YouTube allows the uploader to upgrade the quality of videos uploaded a long time ago in poor quality.

YouTube carried out early experiments with live streaming, including a concert by U2 in 2009, and a question-and-answer session with US President Barack Obama in February 2010.

These tests had relied on technology from 3rd-party partners, but in September 2010, YouTube began testing its own live streaming infrastructure.

On September 13, 2016, YouTube launched a public beta of Community, a social media-based feature that allows users to post text, images, live videos and others in a separate "Community" tab on their channel.

Some of the comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred".

The Huffington Post noted in April 2012 that finding comments on YouTube that appear "offensive, stupid and crass" to the "vast majority" of the people is hardly difficult.

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The official YouTube announcement received 20, 097 "thumbs down" votes and generated more than 32, 000 comments in two days.

YouTube offers users the ability to view its videos on web pages outside their website.

Each YouTube video is accompanied by a piece of HTML that can be used to embed it on any page on the Web.

YouTube announced that it would remove video responses for being an underused feature on August 27, 2013.

In February 2009, YouTube announced a test service, allowing some partners to offer video downloads for free or for a fee paid through Google Checkout.

YouTube Mobile was launched in June 2007, using RTSP streaming for the video.

Not all of YouTube's videos are available on the mobile version of the site.

Since June 2007, YouTube's videos have been available for viewing on a range of Apple products.

In September 2012, YouTube launched its first app for the iPhone, following the decision to drop YouTube as one of the preloaded apps in the iPhone 5 and iOS 6 operating system.

In January 2009, YouTube launched "YouTube for TV", a version of the website tailored for set-top boxes and other TV-based media devices with web browsers, initially allowing its videos to be viewed on the PlayStation 3 and Wii video game consoles.

YouTube launched as a downloadable app for the Nintendo Switch in November 2018.

YouTube interface suggests which local version should be chosen based on the IP address of the user.

The interface of the YouTube website is available in 76 language versions, including Amharic, Albanian, Armenian, Burmese, Khmer, Kyrgyz, Laotian, Mongolian, Persian and Uzbek, which do not have local channel versions.

Access to YouTube was blocked in Turkey between 2008 and 2010, following controversy over the posting of videos deemed insulting to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and some material offensive to Muslims.

In January 2012, it was estimated that visitors to YouTube spent an average of 15 minutes a day on the site, in contrast to the four or five hours a day spent by a typical US citizen watching television.

In December 2012, two billion views were removed from the view counts of Universal and Sony music videos on YouTube, prompting a claim by The Daily Dot that the views had been deleted due to a violation of the site's terms of service, which ban the use of automated processes to inflate view counts.

On November 11, 2021, after testing out this change in March of the same year, YouTube announced it would start hiding dislike counts on videos, making them invisible to viewers.

YouTube stated the decision was in response to experiments which confirmed that smaller YouTube creators were more likely to be targeted in dislike brigading and harassment.

YouTube has faced numerous challenges and criticisms in its attempts to deal with copyright, including the site's first viral video, Lazy Sunday, which had to be taken down, due to copyright concerns.

At the time of uploading a video, YouTube users are shown a message asking them not to violate copyright laws.

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From 2007 to 2009 organizations including Viacom, Mediaset, and the English Premier League have filed lawsuits against YouTube, claiming that it has done too little to prevent the uploading of copyrighted material.

YouTube asserted seven causes of action, and four were ruled in Smith's favor.

In June 2007, YouTube began trials of a system for automatic detection of uploaded videos that infringe copyright.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt regarded this system as necessary for resolving lawsuits such as the one from Viacom, which alleged that YouTube profited from content that it did not have the right to distribute.

In 2011, YouTube described Content ID as "very accurate in finding uploads that look similar to reference files that are of sufficient length and quality to generate an effective ID File".

An independent test in 2009 uploaded multiple versions of the same song to YouTube and concluded that while the system was "surprisingly resilient" in finding copyright violations in the audio tracks of videos, it was not infallible.

YouTube has cited the effectiveness of Content ID as one of the reasons why the site's rules were modified in December 2010 to allow some users to upload videos of unlimited length.

YouTube has a set of community guidelines aimed to reduce abuse of the site's features.

YouTube relies on its users to flag the content of videos as inappropriate, and a YouTube employee will view a flagged video to determine whether it violates the site's guidelines.

The former content moderator said that she was regularly made to exceed YouTube's stated limit of four hours per day of viewing graphic content.

The lawsuit alleges that YouTube's contractors gave little to no training or support for its moderators' mental health, made prospective employees sign NDAs before showing them any examples of content they would see while reviewing, and censored all mention of trauma from its internal forums.

In October 2010, U S Congressman Anthony Weiner urged YouTube to remove from its website videos of imam Anwar al-Awlaki.

YouTube pulled some of the videos in November 2010, stating they violated the site's guidelines.

In December 2010, YouTube added the ability to flag videos for containing terrorism content.

In 2018, YouTube introduced a system that would automatically add information boxes to videos that its algorithms determined may present conspiracy theories and other fake news, filling the infobox with content from Encyclopædia Britannica and Wikipedia as a means to inform users to minimize misinformation propagation without impacting freedom of speech.

YouTube officials apologized for this, stating that their algorithms had misidentified the fire videos and added the information block automatically, and were taking steps to remedy this.

YouTube has been criticized for using an algorithm that gives great prominence to videos that promote conspiracy theories, falsehoods and incendiary fringe discourse.

When users show a political bias in what they choose to view, YouTube typically recommends videos that echo those biases, often with more-extreme viewpoints.

In 2018, it was reported that YouTube was again promoting fringe content about breaking news, giving great prominence to conspiracy videos about Anthony Bourdain's death.

YouTube drew criticism in 2018 when it removed a video from Media Matters compiling offensive statements made by Jones, stating that it violated its policies on "harassment and bullying".

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In January 2019, YouTube said that it had introduced a new policy starting in the United States intended to stop recommending videos containing "content that could misinform users in harmful ways.

In Brazil, YouTube has been linked to pushing pseudoscientific misinformation on health matters, as well as elevated far-right fringe discourse and conspiracy theories.

YouTube joined an initiative led by France and New Zealand with other countries and tech companies in May 2019 to develop tools to be used to block online hate speech and to develop regulations, to be implemented at the national level, to be levied against technology firms that failed to take steps to remove such speech, though the United States declined to participate.

YouTube further stated it would "remove content denying that well-documented violent events, like the Holocaust or the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary, took place.

In June 2020, YouTube banned several channels associated with white supremacy, including those of Stefan Molyneux, David Duke, and Richard B Spencer, asserting these channels violated their policies on hate speech.

YouTube extended this policy in September 2021 to cover videos disseminating misinformation related to any vaccine, including those long approved against measles or Hepatitis B, that had received approval from local health authorities or the World Health Organization.

Google and YouTube implemented policies in October 2021 to deny monetization or revenue to advertisers or content creators that promoted climate change denial, which "includes content referring to climate change as a hoax or a scam, claims denying that long-term trends show the global climate is warming, and claims denying that greenhouse gas emissions or human activity contribute to climate change.

In July 2022 YouTube announced policies to combat misinformation surrounding abortion, such as videos with instructions to perform abortion methods that are considered unsafe and videos that contain misinformation about the safety of abortion.

On November 11, 2017, YouTube announced it was strengthening site security to protect children from unsuitable content.

These questions have been raised in the past, as YouTube has had to remove channels with children's content which, after becoming popular, then suddenly include inappropriate content masked as children's content.

Alternative, some of the most-watched children's programming on YouTube comes from channels that have no identifiable owners, raising concerns of intent and purpose.

In January 2019, YouTube officially banned videos containing "challenges that encourage acts that have an inherent risk of severe physical harm" and videos featuring pranks that "make victims believe they're in physical danger" or cause emotional distress in children.

Subsequently, YouTube began to demonetize and block advertising on the types of videos that have drawn these predatory comments.

YouTube began to flag channels that predominantly feature children, and preemptively disable their comments sections.

YouTube stated it was working on a better system to remove comments on other channels that matched the style of child predators.

YouTube apologized for the errors and reinstated the affected videos.

YouTube stated they do not take action on any video with these comments but those that they have flagged that are likely to draw child predator activity.

YouTube featured an April Fools prank on the site on April 1 of every year from 2008 to 2016.

The next year, when clicking on a video on the main page, the whole page turned upside down, which YouTube claimed was a "new layout".

In 2010, YouTube temporarily released a "TEXTp" mode which rendered video imagery into ASCII art letters "in order to reduce bandwidth costs by $1 per second.

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In 2013, YouTube teamed up with satirical newspaper company The Onion to claim in an uploaded video that the video-sharing website was launched as a contest which had finally come to an end, and would shut down for ten years before being re-launched in 2023, featuring only the winning video.

In 2014, YouTube announced that it was responsible for the creation of all viral video trends, and revealed previews of upcoming trends, such as "Clocking", "Kissing Dad", and "Glub Glub Water Dance".

The next year, YouTube added a music button to the video bar that played samples from "Sandstorm" by Darude.

In 2016, YouTube introduced an option to watch every video on the platform in 360-degree mode with Snoop Dogg.

In September 2016, YouTube announced the launch of its own social networking feature named YouTube Community, allowing only users with over 500 subscribers to enable it on their profiles.

YouTube Go is an Android app aimed at making YouTube easier to access on mobile devices in emerging markets.

YouTube announced the project in September 2016 at an event in India.

YouTube Kids is an American children's video app developed by YouTube, a subsidiary of Google.

YouTube launched a web-based version of YouTube Kids on August 30, 2019.

YouTube Movies is a service by YouTube that shows movies via its website.

On September 28, 2016, YouTube named Lyor Cohen, the co-founder of 300 Entertainment and former Warner Music Group executive, the Global Head of Music.

YouTube Premium was originally announced on November 12, 2014, as "Music Key", a subscription music streaming service, and was intended to integrate with and replace the existing Google Play Music "All Access" service.

On October 28, 2015, the service was relaunched as YouTube Red, offering ad-free streaming of all videos and access to exclusive original content.

In September 2020, YouTube announced that it would be launching a beta version of a new platform of 15-second videos, similar to TikTok, called YouTube Shorts.

In 2018, YouTube started testing a new feature initially called "YouTube Reels".

Experimental features of YouTube can be accessed in an area of the site named TestTube.

Later the same year, YouTube Feather was introduced as a lightweight alternative website for countries with limited internet speeds.

YouTube was awarded a 2008 George Foster Peabody Award, the website being described as a Speakers' Corner that "both embodies and promotes democracy.

The study concluded that YouTube was becoming an important platform by which people acquire news.

Some YouTube videos have themselves had a direct effect on world events, such as Innocence of Muslims which spurred protests and related anti-American violence internationally.

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The anti-bullying It Gets Better Project expanded from a single YouTube video directed to discouraged or suicidal LGBT teens, that within two months drew video responses from hundreds including U S President Barack Obama, Vice President Biden, White House staff, and several cabinet secretaries.

In May 2013, YouTube introduced a trial scheme of 53 subscription channels with prices ranging from $0.

YouTube entered into a marketing and advertising partnership with NBC in June 2006.

In November 2008, YouTube reached an agreement with MGM, Lions Gate Entertainment, and CBS, allowing the companies to post full-length films and television episodes on the site, accompanied by advertisements in a section for U S viewers called "Shows".

In November 2009, YouTube launched a version of "Shows" available to UK viewers, offering around 4, 000 full-length shows from more than 60 partners.

In January 2010, YouTube introduced an online film rentals service, which is only available to users in the United States, Canada, and the UK as of 2010.

In May 2007, YouTube launched its Partner Program, a system based on AdSense which allows the uploader of the video to share the revenue produced by advertising on the site.

YouTube typically takes 45 percent of the advertising revenue from videos in the Partner Program, with 55 percent going to the uploader.

In 2013, YouTube introduced an option for channels with at least a thousand subscribers to require a paid subscription in order for viewers to watch videos.

In September 2016, after introducing an enhanced notification system to inform users of these violations, YouTube's policies were criticized by prominent users, including Phillip DeFranco and Vlogbrothers.

YouTube gives an option for copyright holders to locate and remove their videos or to have them continue running for revenue.

YouTube has been censored, filtered, or banned for a variety of reasons, including:.

In some countries, YouTube is blocked for more limited periods of time such as during periods of unrest, the run-up to an election, or in response to upcoming political anniversaries.