EOTO: YouTube

 

Youtube has become one of the most popular websites in the world and is home to over two billion monthly viewers. Although the growth of the global phenomenon was rapid, it started as a simple video uploading software for friends and families to share their lives with a simple press of a button.

Originally launched in 2005, former PayPal employees Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim came together with the intention of creating a platform for people to upload videos, who do not have any technological knowledge or experience.

In a New York Times article written shortly after the release of YouTube, it was said, “Mr. Hurley and Mr. Chen started YouTube after the two struggled to share videos of a dinner party in January 2005". The intentions of creating this website were clearly different than how it was actually used by a global audience.

Shortly after the release, approximately 1 year later, YouTube was bought by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion dollars. Google still owns YouTube to this day, and it remains one of, if not, the most successful investments for the company to date.

The above graph illustrates the types of videos that are uploaded and how they have grown and changed over time. Overall, videos uploaded of people by people seem to remain the highest uploaded videos, since their intense uprising in 2008.

Something notable however, is the steady yet rapid increase of gaming videos uploaded to YouTube. The number of daily gaming videos uploaded from the creation of YouTube in 2005 up until 2008 remained at 0. However, after 2008, the increase began and in today's society gaming videos are some of the most popular and sought out types of videos on the platform.

Streaming video games is in such high demand right now, and YouTube is a great platform for people to fulfill those demands. People have also incorporated gaming videos into their posts, making "Gaming Youtubers" one of the most popular types of Youtubers today.

But what is a YouTuber you ask? It is arguably one of the most desirable jobs by this generation and they have been recognized as some of the most prominent people in the entertainment industry today. From David Dobrik to Miranda Sings to Logan Paul, Youtubers have taken over the world. They are some of the highest paid entertainment industry workers, with some of them making millions of dollars per video that they post.

A YouTuber is not the only thing that Youtube has produced outside of just a typical video uploading platform. In 2017, Youtube created its own streaming service, joining the likes of Netflix, Hulu, and more, called YoutubeTV. This service however, serves a different purpose than the streaming networks listed above.

YoutubeTV is seemingly created to replace cable television, rather than just serving as another place to watch original TV shows and movies. There are nearly 100 different networks such as CBS, ABC, NBC, and more, that can be viewed through YouTubeTV. This may explain the expensive monthly fee, that being around $60-80 per month depending on the plan, but Youtube is determined to make every penny worth it. 

YouTube is currently the 2nd most visited website on the internet, and has over 1 billion videos watched by people all over the world each day. The amount of content produced on the website seems unthinkable, as the website allows anybody to post their own videos to the site, in a variety of different ways. YouTube is now worth around $200 billion dollars, so its safe to say that Google's $1.6 billion dollar investment was definitely worth it.

https://books.google.com/books?id=mg1rDwAAQBAJ&lpg=PT5&ots=RCoOPyharM&dq=origins%20of%20youtube&lr&pg=PT21#v=onepage&q&f=false 

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/09/business/09cnd-deal.html 

https://www.omnicoreagency.com/youtube-statistics/ 

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Golshan-Golnari/publication/263654088_What_Drives_the_Growth_of_YouTube_Measuring_and_Analyzing_the_Evolution_Dynamics_of_YouTube_Video_Uploads/links/0c96053b6f718bad5e000000/What-Drives-the-Growth-of-YouTube-Measuring-and-Analyzing-the-Evolution-Dynamics-of-YouTube-Video-Uploads.pdf 

https://tv.youtube.com/welcome/?utm_source=pm&utm_medium=gs&utm_campaign=1006175