YouTube Journey of a DECADE: The Evolution of online video

No doubt, YouTube is the most popular online-video destination on the planet. The video-sharing website and ad revenue machine, turns 10 years old on Saturday February 14th, 2015 (Valentine's Day).

It's a result of teamwork, hard work, entrepreneurial spirit and creative mind - an innovation that have changed the social media world.

Online video can engage people in many ways. Some of these are engineered, such as ‘liking’ or leaving a comment, and others entirely unexpected, like the YouTube-inspired servers for Minecraft. Plenty of offline occurrences spring from the uploading of a video, from massive conventions to familial reunions.

Hello, World!

YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal.

For those who don't know... Google didn’t invent, nor always own YouTube. YouTube was actually founded by three friends who were ex-PayPal employees: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. The first YouTube video was titled Me at the zoo, and shows co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. The video was uploaded on April 23, 2005, and can still be viewed on the site.

Show Me the MONEY

The site officially launched in November 2005. By July 2006 the site was getting 65,000 new videos uploaded to it every day, according to Wikipedia. In October of the same year, Google YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock - an stratospheric sum at the time, but one which ended up being a great deal for Google given how popular the site has become.

Summer 2007, the ads begin. Google starts rolling out the first ads for YouTube, responding to questions about how the search giant will mint money from its YouTube purchase. The first advertisements are semi-transparent banners that pop up on the lower 20% of YouTube videos.

Global Users TODAY

Today, YouTube boasts well over 1 billion active users, who between them upload over 300 minutes of new content every day.

STATISTICS from YouTube and Pew Research:

• YouTube has more than 1 billion users
•     Every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views
•     The number of hours people are watching on YouTube each month is up 50% year over year
•     300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute
•     Around 60% of a creator’s views comes from outside their home country
•     YouTube is localized in 75 countries and available in 61 languages
•     Half of YouTube views are now on mobile devices
•     YouTube is the world’s second largest social networking site, behind Facebook
•     82% of 18- to 29-year-olds used YouTube in 2014
•     76% of blacks and 74% of Hispanics use YouTube, way more than the 57% of whites.

Taking a look at the transformation the platform has brought in this 10 years, it is a great hope of what we can expect from Youtube and the likes - with the growing users of internet globally.