YouTube Facts

When YouTube, the online video sharing phenomenon, celebrated its fifth birthday on April 22, 2010, the site shared some pretty interesting facts about its history and impact over its brief lifetime. Here are some of the highlights:

• The domain name “YouTube” was registered in February, 2005.
• The first video uploaded to YouTube (on April 23, 2005) featured co-founder Jawed Karim of the San Diego Zoo and was 19 seconds long. It’s been viewed 3.2 million times as of July, 2010.
• The current most-watched video on YouTube is Lady GaGa’s “Bad Romance” music video (almost 248 million views as of July 19, 2010).
• Google paid $1.65 billion in stock to acquire YouTube in November, 2006.
• The first advertising formats (Participatory Video Ads and Brand Channels) were launched in August, 2006.
• 24 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute.
• YouTube viewing exceeds 24 billion views per day, nearly twice the prime-time audience of all three major US broadcast networks combined.
• As of July 2010, the channel with the most subscribers is NigaHiga (Asian-themed comedy videos), with 2.47 million.
• The channel with the second highest number of subscribers is Lucas Cruikshank’s Fred’s Channel, with 1.86 million as of July, 2010.
• YouTube has more than 96.1 million unique viewers each month.
• Hundreds of millions of videos are watched monthly through mobile devices.
• Google’s automatic speech recognition technology has the capability to translate and caption YouTube into 51 languages.
• YouTube is localized in 22 countries, across 24 different languages.
• YouTube made its biggest venture into free sports streaming in April 2010 with 60 matches of the Indian Premier League cricket season.
• YouTube has more than 7,000 hours of full-length movies and TV shows.
• More than 1 billion video views per week earn money for their posters.