YouTube is now officially six-years-old, having launched in beta in May 2005.
That seems like a lifetime ago and, judging by the way the online video site has evolved and grown over that time, it may as well be.
YouTube Is Born
co-founders Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, all of whom are now much richer than most of us can even ever dream of being, first registered the YouTube domain in February 2005. Three months later and they launched the site that is now known and used the world over.
It quickly became a hit thanks to how easy it made uploading videos to the Web, a new concept back then. It also, it has to be said, helped that copyrighted clips were rife on YouTube, with full films shown in multiple 10-minute blocks.
It only took 18 months for YouTube to have reached such a level that Google acquired it for a whopping $1.65 billion in October 2006. A sum of money it has been chasing to make back in revenue ever since.
Sixth Birthday
YouTube hasn’t made as much of a fanfare about its sixth birthday as it did about its fifth birthday. But it has marked the occasion with a blog post, a graphic marking its progression over the years (embedded below) and announcements of a couple of big milestones being hit.
YouTube now gets 3 billion views per day. It took until October 2009 for YouTube to hit 1 billion views per day; it hit 2 billion views per day in May 2010, and now it’s getting 3 billion.
It’s also getting 48 hours (2 full days’ worth) of video uploaded every minute. That’s an increase of 37 in the past six months, and 100 percent in the past year. Which is all rather impressive.
Conclusions
Happy Birthday, YouTube. Well done on an impressive first six years of life, and here’s to another six years on top.
