The Popularity Of YouTube

YouTube is an tremendously popular sight, with over 822,000,000 search results on Google alone. It's a well-thought out site, and best of all, it's extremely free!

Launched in 2005 buy three former paypal employees, its popularity quickly climbed the charts, surpassing even Myspace's popularity. Even on Google, it has more search results than “video games”-and that includes all video games. If you type in just generic 'video games', yes, YouTube has more results than that. But what is YouTube all about?

Quite simply, YouTube is a website in which you can post user-made videos. For example, did you take a video of you and your friend goofing off on the guitar? Post it there. Did you make a video of you dancing and you want to show it to the world? Post it on YouTube.

However, YouTube didn't start out the most popular thing in the world; in fact, it started out as in a little tiny shop above the pizzeria, and its popularity soared. As the website got started, they received 65,000 uploaded videos a day, with over one million views per day.

Researchers estimate that 15 hour's worth of videos are uploaded to the website every minute, making the site amazingly popular, so popular, in fact, that Google bought the site from YouTube's origonal creators for $1.65 billion dollars - surpassing the amount that even Myspace was sold for!

YouTube was started after the employees had trouble quote “figuring out how to share videos at a dinner party.” They decided, why not build a website where you could upload videos? The initial investment, provided by Sequoia Capita1, was only $11.5 million. A well-worthy investment, and built for the enjoyment of many. Excellent dinner party thoughts!

There have been few problems with the site, something both the users and site owners enjoy. The only major problem is that YouTube cannot ensure that all the videos are copyright proof, allowing many videos to stay up on the website that are copyright of people or copyright of companies such as Warner Brothers or the Disney Channel. With over 15 hours worth of video1, it's hard for YouTube to delete every video that's copyrighted, no matter now many workers they have.

Even though it warns users not to do this, many still violate the rule. However, considering this is YouTube's only problem, they have it extremely lucky compared to websites like Myspace, where users post too much identifying personal information. For example, “My name is Ellen Black, and my phone number is 1-555-555-555!”

However, some companies do use it to advertise for their music 'singers' or 'rappers', and do use it as a legitimate advertising tool. Businesses, recently, have discovered the benefits to using YouTube to advertise as well.

All in all, YouTube is an extremely popular sight, and could even surpass the visitors of Google if people start turning first to YouTube to get their information.