YouTube is 10 Years Old

Happy Birthday To You(Tube)

bryankramer.com

Our favourite video site turned 10 years old on Valentine’s Day. I find it a bit hard to wrap my head around the fact that YouTube is that old. It feels like yesterday that me and friends huddled around computers in the lab discovering the first funny cat video montages slew with ridiculous sound effects.

Think back to how we consumed video entertainment ten years ago. Blockbusters was still a thing. Having rentals mailed to you was about as extreme as everything got. YouTube changed all of that. Our high demand for instant content it what’s led to the progression of streaming services such as Netflix or Amazon Prime. People can now make very comfortable livings just from playing games on YouTube; it’s crazy, isn't it?

YouTube was created on February 14^th, 2005. In October 2006 its creators had sold YouTube to Google for $1.6 Billion. That’s not a bad profit turnaround for just 20 months.

YouTube was created by two ex-PayPal employees Chad Hurley and Steve Chen who were enjoying PayPal’s acquisition by eBay for $1.4 Billion. The two of them created a video during a get together but then they shortly realised that they had no way to share the video. It was too big to send via email and uploading it conventionally would have taken hours. Thus, YouTube came into be.

webbyawards.com

Let’s take a quick look at what YouTube has accomplished over 10 years.

• YouTube has more than 1 billion users
• Every day, people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views
• The number of hours people are watching on YouTube each month is up 50% year on year
• 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
• ~60% of a creator’s views come from outside their home country
• YouTube is localised in 75 countries and available in 61 languages

Not too bad for 10 years, right?

So what does the future hold for YouTube you ask? What will it become to be in 2025? Unfortunately, YouTube haven’t laid out their plans for all of us to see just yet. My best assumption tells me that YouTube (like all big social giants) are going to be spending a lot of time to make YouTube a one stop software for every multimedia need anyone could need. Look at the steps Snapchat have just taken. The race is on to be the first multimedia winner and so far most brands are holding their cards quite close to their chests.

Imagine it though, you log into one service and through that you have access to the music you want, the live sports you want, the television and films you want there and then. Just about every streaming service you could need. It’d be pretty useful, right? Right.

YouTube celebrities have flourished during the video services time at the top. In 2014, YouTube’s biggest star PewDiePie generated 4.1 billion views from his channel. In 2013 he made roughly 4 million. Where people like PewDiePie will end up in 2025 is a heavily pondered question. I can only assume that he’ll end up starting his own firm. Or just continue to happily plod out videos of playthroughs much to the envy of everyone who just wants to play games all day.

YouTube has accomplished such incredible things in the past 10 years and has been at the epicentre with the rest of the huge brands in this age of digital growth. I look forward to seeing what the next 10 years of YouTube brings us.

I’m willing to bet anything that they still won’t have fixed that ****ing loading bar.

Tom Welby

Tom has a degree in Creative and Professional Writing and now he currently manages, edits and writes for this blog. His other interests include Arnold Schwarzenegger films and his dog. Follow him @TomAtSMF

Contact us on Twitter, on Facebook, or leave your comments below. To find out about social media training or management why not take a look at our website for more info http://socialmediacambridge.co.uk/.