YouTube is a video-sharing website. Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, three former employees of the American e-commerce company PayPal, registered it on February 14, 2005. They reasoned that regular people would enjoy sharing their "home videos." The headquarters of the company are in San Bruno, California.
The domain name "YouTube.com" was activated on February 14, 2005, with video upload options being integrated on April 23, 2005, after being named "Tune In, Hook Up," the original idea of Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim.
The idea was for an online dating service that eventually failed but had an excellent video and uploading platform. After the infamous Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson Halftime Show incident, the three creators realized they couldn't find any videos of it on the internet, so they made the changes to become the first major video-sharing platform.
The new company's concept was for non-computer experts to be able to use a simple interface to publish, upload, and view streaming videos using standard web browsers and modern internet speeds.
The site received 30,000 visitors per day shortly after it opened in May 2005.
YouTube had over two million video views per day by the time it was officially launched on December 15, 2005. By January 2006, the figure had risen to more than 25 million views.
In March 2006, the site's video library surpassed 25 million, with more than 20,000 new videos uploaded every day.
YouTube was serving more than 100 million videos per day by the summer of 2006, and the number of videos being uploaded to the site showed no signs of slowing down.
Users can interact with YouTube by uploading videos, viewing them, rating them with likes and dislikes, sharing them, adding videos to playlists, reporting, commenting on videos, and subscribing to other users.
The slogan "Broadcast Yourself" has been used for several years, and the reference to user profiles as "Channels" represents the platform's premise of allowing anyone to operate a personal broadcasting station similar to television with the addition of video on demand.
YouTube is without a doubt one of the world's most established video social media platforms right now.
YouTube will have 2.476 billion users in July 2022, ranking second in our ranking of the world's most 'active' social media platforms.
Furthermore, data published in the company's advertising tools shows that the number of active users on YouTube has increased rapidly in the last year.
According to the most recent statistics, approximately 31.0% of all people on the planet now use YouTube.
However, because the company restricts platform use to people aged 13 and up, YouTube's 'eligible' use rate is likely to be even higher than these figures indicate.
In the third quarter of 2022, YouTube's worldwide advertising revenues totaled $7.07 billion USD.