YouTube

YouTube is the world’s largest and most popular online video sharing and social media platform. In 2024, the platform boasted an estimated 2.7 billion monthly users, who reportedly watch about a billion hours of video every day. Accessible through its main website and various apps, YouTube is a virtually unmatched streaming behemoth. Originally founded by tech entrepreneurs Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim in 2005, YouTube was purchased by Google in 2006. Since that time, it has become the tech giant’s second most visited website behind only that of Google’s trademark search engine. In addition to allowing people to watch videos online, YouTube provides creators with a platform through which they can post original content, attract an audience, engage with viewers, and raise revenue through monetization. Along with its main platform, YouTube also offers a number of other specialized services, including the YouTube Premium subscription service and YouTube TV, a live television streaming service.

History

YouTube was the brainchild of Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, a trio of budding young tech entrepreneurs who first met as employees of the e-payment service PayPal in the early 2000s. Chen was born in Taiwan in 1978 and immigrated to the United States with his family when he was eight years old. He attended the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), ultimately graduating with a degree in computer science in 2003. Hurley, the only American-born YouTube founder, earned a degree in design at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania in 1999 before subsequently taking a job at PayPal. Karim was born in Merseburg, East Germany, in 1979 to a Bangladeshi father and a German mother. When xenophobia forced his family out of their home country in 1992, they immigrated to the United States and settled in St. Paul, Minnesota. He briefly studied computer science at UIUC, but left school before he graduated to accept a position at PayPal.

In late 2004, Chen, Hurley, and Karim began work on an idea they developed for a website that would allow users to upload video-dating profiles. Using Hurley’s Menlo Park, California, garage as a base of operations, the three designed and built what would become one of the most visited websites on the Internet. On February 14, 2005, Hurley gave the website its name when he officially registered the trademark, logo, and domain for YouTube. Shortly thereafter, the original incarnation of YouTube was launched to a small subset of users. Before long, it became clear that YouTube was attracting little attention as a video dating website. In order to save their venture, Chen, Hurley, and Karim had to make an unplanned pivot. Fortunately, some of YouTube’s early users started uploading different types of videos to the website. Noticing this trend, the founders retooled YouTube into a free video-hosting platform. By April 2005, a private beta version of the new YouTube was active online. The first video uploaded to YouTube as it is known today was an eighteen-second-long clip called “Me at the Zoo” that featured Karim standing in front of a group of elephants at the San Diego Zoo while discussing their trunks. The public beta version of YouTube was launched the following month.

YouTube became wildly popular almost overnight. In October 2005, a Nike ad featuring Brazilian soccer star Ronaldinho putting on his pair of the company’s “Golden Boots” was the first video to break one million views on the site. At the end of the year, YouTube fully launched out of beta and became fully available to the public. YouTube’s rapid rise did not come without complications, however. After several clips of a sketch from Saturday Night Live started garnering millions of views in February 2006, NBC asked to have the most popular of these clips removed from the site. This incident led to the implementation of YouTube’s Content Verification Program aimed at identifying videos that infringe on copyrights the following year. Even in the face of this sort of setback, YouTube continued to be a runaway success—so much so that the tech giant Google negotiated a deal with Chen, Hurley, and Karim to acquire the platform in October 2006.

Google’s first major move after purchasing YouTube was to launch a mobile version of the website in June 2007. Later that same year, ads appeared on the platform for the first time. At the end of 2007, YouTube began offering its Partner Program to some higher profile creators. This program made it possible for creators to monetize their content through advertising. YouTube’s use of advertising expanded further in 2008. Initially, ads on YouTube came in the form of semi-transparent banners that popped up in the lower portion of videos and could be clicked away after a few seconds. Starting in late 2008, pre-roll ads and sponsored videos began to appear as well. Skippable ads presented in a format called TrueView followed in 2010.

Over time, YouTube gradually became a media giant unto itself. In 2009, YouTube teamed up with media company Vivendi to create a new music video service known as Vevo. Designed to address music companies’ increasing concerns about piracy and unfair licensing terms, Vevo provided a way for music video to be legally distributed on YouTube. Two years later, Google introduced YouTube Live, an addition to the traditional YouTube platform that made it possible to livestream a wide range of content. Later in 2011, YouTube also started producing original content and launched a rental service through which users could stream movies and television shows.

In February 2014, long-time Google employee Susan Wojcicki took over as YouTube CEO. One of the first major changes of her tenure was the introduction of a family-friendly version of the platform called YouTube Kids in 2015. That year also saw the arrival of YouTube Gaming, a livestreaming platform aimed at gamers, and YouTube Red, the first premium iteration of YouTube. The latter was eventually separate music and video services called YouTube Music and YouTube Premium. A number of negative developments also occurred under Wojcicki’s leadership. In August 2016, YouTube started demonetizing the videos of users who posted material that in any way violated the platform’s advertiser-oriented content guidelines. Some critics argued that this was effectively a method of censorship.

YouTube continued its evolution in 2017 with the introduction of the on-demand streaming television service YouTube TV, which became available nationwide in 2019. YouTube was fined $170 million in 2019 by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on the heels of an investigation that concluded the platform was violating children’s privacy laws by collecting their data without parents’ permission. Regardless of this outcome and various controversies related to content, advertising, and censorship in countries like China, and other issues, YouTube continued to grow in popularity and use. According to a Pew Research study, during the COVID-19 pandemic, YouTube's growth as a learning and discovery platform for students and workers stuck at home outpaced that of other social media platforms.

Overview

YouTube is a free online video sharing platform that has become one of the largest social media and search engine websites on the Internet. Accessible to anyone with a computer or mobile device and an Internet connection, YouTube is a popular destination for information, entertainment, and much more. There are two main types of YouTube users: creators and viewers. While creators are responsible for producing and uploading much of the content featured on the platform, viewers utilize YouTube to consume that content by watching videos and subscribing to channels. Understanding YouTube means taking a closer look at how each of these user types interact with the platform.

Viewers

The vast majority of people who visit and use YouTube do so as viewers. Utilizing YouTube as a viewer simply means either going to the YouTube website via a web browser or through an application on a mobile device and watching videos. When viewed in a browser or on a mobile device, YouTube videos appear in a video player window with a number of controls at the bottom. These controls allow the user to adjust the volume, change the video size, turn captions on or off, select the video resolution setting, and more. There is also a sliding bar that can be used to directly seek to any point in the video. All the same features are present when a YouTube video is embedded on another website.

When watching a YouTube videos, viewers sometimes have the ability to interact with advertisements. Some pre-roll and mid-roll ads that appear in YouTube videos can be skipped after a few seconds when a special skip button pops up. Viewers can also click away pop-up ads known as cards that are included in some videos. Occasionally, a viewer may be presented with an interactive survey that takes the place of a normal advertisement.

YouTube viewers have the option to create an account on the platform. Although an account is not required to watch videos, creating and using a YouTube account has some advantages. When signed into an account, viewers can like and comment on videos, subscribe to channels, automatically find other videos that might be of interest, share videos with greater ease, and more. Having a YouTube account also gives a viewer access to the guide, a panel that provides useful links to their subscriptions, viewed videos, liked videos, a watch later list, and other options.

One of the biggest advantages of YouTube for viewers is how easily accessible the platform’s videos are from a variety of devices. YouTube videos can be viewed in different ways beyond just visiting the main website. There are YouTube apps for both iOS and Android that make it easy to watch videos on a smartphone. There are also apps for devices like Roku, Chromecast, and video game consoles that allow viewers to watch YouTube videos on their televisions. Some smart televisions even have YouTube apps that are built in or available to be downloaded.

Subscribing to channels is a key part of the YouTube experience. Creators who upload content on YouTube make their videos available through their own individual channels. Viewers can subscribe to the channels of creators they like. Doing so gives viewers direct access to videos made by their favorite creators and makes it easier for them to support those creators.

Creators

Users who join YouTube as creators provide the content upon which the platform is built. Creators can get started on YouTube by making their channel. A channel is a hub for all of a creator’s content and a platform through which they can interact with viewers. Creators also have special access to YouTube’s tools for uploading and editing videos. Once creators begin to upload a video, they can choose from three different privacy settings, including public, unlisted, and private. Public videos are visible to all YouTube viewers. Unlisted videos are visible only to those who have access to a specific URL address. Private videos are visible only the people with whom the creator chooses to share it.

Creators primarily manage their channels through YouTube Studio, a feature through which users can monitor views, respond to comments, and more. YouTube Studio also includes Video Manager, a tool that can be used to edit videos, add captions or annotations, and otherwise manipulate videos. While more experienced creators often rely on professional editing software to edit their videos, YouTube Studio and Video Manager offer built-in tools make it possible to carry out some video editing tasks on the YouTube platform itself.

For many YouTube creators, uploading videos and maintaining a channel on the platform is means of making money. This is because YouTube allows for the monetization of content through the YouTube Partner Program (YPP). Creators who meet the YPP’s guidelines can sign up and start earning money at any time. Some of the program’s guidelines include adhering to all YPP policies, living in countries where the YPP is available, having more than four thousand public watch hours in the last year, having more than one thousand subscribers, and having a linked account with Google’s AdSense advertising program. Creators who are accepted into the YPP can earn money through advertising revenue, channel memberships, merchandising, and more. While monetization is obviously beneficial for creators, it is not necessarily permanent. Videos and channels can be demonetized if a creator violates YouTube’s policies, such as by posting copyrighted or inappropriate content.

By 2024, YouTube announced it had a new tool for tracking videos made with artificial intelligence (AI), and asked creators to self-report when posting realistic-looking videos generated by AI. Creators who did not self report risked being suspended and having their content removed, among other penalties. Critics voiced wondered whether such self-reporting would be effective in labelling AI-generated content, however.

The Algorithm

The inner workings of YouTube are controlled by a special set of computer instructions called an algorithm. The YouTube algorithm determines how videos and associated content like comments and the engagements are processed in order to rank and recommend videos on the basis of relevance and viewer satisfaction. The point of all this is to help users find the most relevant content as quickly and easily as possible. While the algorithm is very important to how YouTube operates, little information has been public revealed about how it works. What is known is that the YouTube algorithm was originally based on what videos viewers watched. Later it became more focused on watch time and, later still, viewer satisfaction. For creators who want to get as much as possible out of their YouTube experience, being mindful of the algorithm is very helpful.

Other YouTube Services

Over time, YouTube gradually introduced a broader range of services that went well beyond its original video sharing platform. Chief among these is YouTube Premium, a subscription service that provides users with an ad-free viewing experience across all of YouTube’s video offerings. YouTube Premium began as YouTube Red, a similar service that focused on both video and music before eventually being split into YouTube Premium and YouTube Music Premium. The latter is a popular service that allows users to listen to music without advertisement interruptions. YouTube Music Premium also makes its possible for users to play music when they are offline or while they have their screen turned off. Another of YouTube’s most popular supplementary services is YouTube TV, which offers access to an array of cable television channels and sports networks. Other special services include YouTube Movies and Shows, YouTube Gaming, and YouTube Live. Facing pressure from TikTok, YouTube launched Shorts, a short-form video feature, in 2020.

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