YouTube turns 8 years old

Video-sharing addicts, especially those immersed in YouTube, shouldn't miss this date: it's the eighth birthday of the world's most high-profile video-sharing site.

 

On April 23, 2005 (US time), the first video —all of 20 seconds— was posted on YouTube, with no one having a clue as to how big the site would become in the years that followed.

 

"On 23 April 2005, Jawed Karim uploaded the first ever video on YouTube at 8:27 p.m. The video was shot at the San Diego Zoo by Yakov Lapitsky... Today, in just one month, the video-sharing website generates more content than all the major movie studios have in the last 60 years. As a result, YouTube has had over one trillion views in the course of its eight-year life," Euronews.com noted.

 

At the time, Karim co-created YouTube with Chad Hurley and Steve Chen in February 2005. The three were former employees of PayPal.

 

Eventually, the site began to gather momentum, with content contributed by users such as video blogs and original.

 

By July 2006, Euronews noted YouTube had announced more than 65,000 new videos were being uploaded to it daily, and it was getting 100 million video views a day.

 

"In November 2006, the company was bought by Google for 1.26 billion euros. Now, YouTube operates as a subsidiary of Google. It is estimated that in 2007 YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000," it added.

 

Meanwhile, a separate article on T3.com said YouTube today is believed to be the "third most visited website on the net after Google and Facebook."

 

"In May 2011, YouTube revealed that it was serving more than 3 billion views per day. That figure became 4 billion a day by January 2012," it added.

 

Future plans

 

As it looks forward to its future years, YouTube will soon let content makers charge for videos, T3.com said.

 

"Red vs Blue creators Rooster Teeth are expected to be amongst the first companies to charge for content when the service launches later this year," it added. — TJD, GMA News