25 Intriguing YouTube Facts You May Not Know

YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steven Chen, and Jawed Karim, former employees of PayPal, an online commerce website. They registered the domain name in February 2005 and the site was officially launched that December.

In October 2006, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in stocks, only eighteen months after YouTube’s creation. Karim received $66 million in Google stock, Chen received $310 million, and Hurley received $334 million. Not bad for three dudes who had just lost their jobs a couple of years before.

It’s estimated that more than 1 billion users use YouTube each month mainly for entertainment. In other words, more than 15 percent of the planet visits YouTube on a monthly basis.

YouTube can be found in sixty-one countries and across sixty-one languages, while nearly 75 percent of its users live outside the US. Now that’s the kind of global success even The Beatles would be jealous of.

There’s no other way to explain the fact that about seven hundred tweets per minute contain a YouTube link.

About one hundred hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every single minute. In other words, that means that more videos are uploaded to YouTube in two months than the three major US networks created in sixty years.

“Music” is the YouTube channel most subscribed to with more than 88 million subscribers.

Rebecca Black’s “Friday” holds a not so flattering record. It is estimated that her YouTube debut may be the most “disliked” video in YouTube history since it received 3.1 million dislikes before the music video was finally removed. The thought of how many more million dislikes it could get if it wasn’t removed is truly scary.

Psy’s “Gangnam Style” is the most watched YouTube video ever with nearly 2.2 billion views and counting.

If we exclude professional music videos, the most viewed viral video of all time is the classic “Charlie bit my finger—again!,” which has surpassed eight hundred million views.

The first video uploaded to YouTube, titled “Me at the zoo,” made its debut on April 23, 2005. The nineteen-second video was shot by Yakov Lapitsky and shows YouTube cofounder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. It has more than 16.5 million views as we’re writing this list.

The first words uttered on YouTube were “All right, so here we are in front of the elephants” when Karim was trying to “charm” the camera.

Surprisingly, many viewers who use the site to watch music videos, pranks, and short viral videos ignore the fact that there are over seven thousand hours of full-length movies and TV shows on YouTube as well.

More than one million creators from over thirty countries are earning money from their YouTube videos, while nearly half of them are making a living from that.

By 2012 YouTube had signed over ten thousand advertising partners, including titans of the entertainment industry such as Disney, Univision, Channel 4, and Channel 5 among many others. Most of these partners are making six figures a year. Not bad, huh?

The idea came to its founders at a dinner party at Steve Chen’s place in San Francisco when due to some email attachment error they were not able to share the videos of the party that night.

the infamous wardrobe malfunction of Janet Jackson with Justin Timberlake at Super Bowl XXXVIII. Jawed Karim was not able to find the footage of the incident and so this was when he decided to give birth to YouTube.

YouTube’s viewers are approximately 56 percent male and 44 percent female. It is estimated that by 2020 male viewership will be around 60 percent.

Time magazine described many of the comments left on YouTube as grammatically hideous, hateful, angry, and spiteful. More specifically, the famous mag reported that “Some comments on YouTube make you weep for the future of humanity just for the spelling alone, never mind the obscenity and the naked hatred.”

In its early days YouTube’s founders used Craigslist to try to popularize the site by offering $100 to attractive girls who would post ten or more videos of themselves. Unfortunately, they didn’t get a single response.

Or so the committee of the Peabody Awards thought when in 2008 it decided to award and recognize YouTube for helping promote democracy by acting as a “Speaker’s Corner.”

According to Alexa rankings YouTube is the third biggest (read, most powerful) website in the world behind only Google and Facebook and ahead of online giants such as Yahoo, eBay, Wikipedia, Amazon, and, of course, the founders’ former employee, PayPal.

Way before YouTube appeared there was ShareYourWorld.com. In 1997 it became the very first video-sharing website but due to the poor technology at the time it went out of business pretty quickly.

If let’s say an average human nowadays lives about seventy-five years (give or take), then he or she would need about twenty-three lifetimes or over 1,700 years to watch all the video content on YouTube as of this writing. So unless you’re a Highlander you need to hurry up because in one week’s time you might need twenty-four lifetimes to catch up with all the newly uploaded videos.

Believe it or not YouTube started life as a dating site called “Tune In, Hook Up” influenced by the site Hot or Not, which let users rate the attractiveness of potential partners. Needless to say the project failed miserably.