YouTube Wikipedia

In 2010, YouTube temporarily released a “TEXTp” mode which rendered video imagery into ASCII art letters “in order to reduce bandwidth costs by $1 per second.” The next year, when clicking on a video on the main page, the whole page turned upside down, which YouTube claimed was a “new layout”. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov labeled the court decision as “symbolic” and warned Google that it “should not be restricting the actions of our broadcasters on its platform.”

YouTube has been led by a CEO since its founding in 2005, beginning with Chad Hurley, who led the company until 2010. The decision of Alphabet to bring back YouTube creators who engaged in misinformation was criticized for prioritizing “free expression” over “facts”. The user must go through age verification via payment, scanned ID, or selfie to access all features if they are detected to be a minor. On YouTube, this will be based on factors such as searches and video history, and the age of the account. As of December 2024update the Playables catalog has over 130 games in various genres, including trivia, action and sports.

In April 2010, Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” became the most-viewed video, becoming the first video to reach 200 million views on May 9, 2010. Hurley announced that he would be stepping down as chief executive officer of YouTube to take an advisory role and that Salar Kamangar would take over as head of the company in October 2010. In 2011, more than three billion videos were being watched each day with 48 hours of new videos uploaded every minute. That year, the company simplified its interface to increase the time users would spend on the site. Unofficial uploads of the skit to YouTube drew in more than five million collective views by February 2006 before they were removed when NBCUniversal requested it two months later based on copyright concerns.

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In 2023, YouTube’s advertising revenue totaled $31.7 billion, a 2% increase from the $31.1 billion reported in 2022. It also offers YouTube Premium, a paid subscription option for watching content without ads. Google expanded YouTube’s business model from generating revenue through advertisements alone to offering paid content such as movies and exclusive content explicitly produced for YouTube. YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. The developer, Google, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. Get the official YouTube app on iPhones and iPads.

In May 2013, YouTube introduced a trial scheme of 53 subscription channels with prices ranging from $0.99 to $6.99 a month. The vast majority of videos on YouTube are free to view and supported by advertising. In May 2018, after London Metropolitan Police claimed that drill music videos glamorizing violence gave rise to gang violence, YouTube deleted 30 videos. It also found more “mainstream-adjacent Conservative creators” gaining over alt-right and extremist videos by 2020. Journalist Virginia Heffernan stated in The New York Times that such videos have “surprising implications” for the dissemination of culture and even the future of classical music. In cases where the entire site is banned due to one particular video, YouTube will often agree to remove or limit access to that video in order to restore service.

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This will occur on channels whose content is deemed “advertiser-friendly”, and all revenue will go directly to Google without any share given to the uploader. DeFranco argued that not being able to earn advertising revenue on such videos was “censorship by a different name”. The move was seen as an attempt to ensure that videos being monetized did not lead to controversy, but was criticized for penalizing smaller YouTube channels.

YouTube Primetime Channels

Videos of the 2.5% of artists categorized as “mega”, “mainstream” and “mid-sized” received 90.3% of the relevant views on YouTube and Vevo in that year. Indie creators have built grassroots followings numbering in the thousands at very little cost or effort, while mass retail and radio promotion proved problematic. As of 2018update, public access to YouTube is blocked by China, North Korea, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Eritrea, Sudan and South Sudan mostly due to freedom of speech laws.

Difficulty in finding enough dating videos led to a change of plans, with the site’s founders deciding to accept uploads of any video. They created posts on Craigslist asking attractive women to upload videos of themselves to YouTube in exchange for a $100 reward. Hurley and Chen said that the original idea for YouTube was a video version of an online dating service and had been influenced by the website Hot or Not. According to a story that has often been repeated in the media, Hurley and Chen developed the idea for YouTube during the early months of 2005, after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen’s apartment in San Francisco.

In April 2024, YouTube announced it would be “strengthening chicken road 2 game our enforcement on third-party apps that violate YouTube’s Terms of Service, specifically ad-blocking apps”. Users of ad blockers may be given a pop-up warning saying “Video player will be blocked after 3 videos”. In October, YouTube announced that they would be rolling out customizable user handles in addition to channel names, which would also become channel URLs.

Videos, Music and Live Streams

In 2010, it was reported that nearly a third of the videos with advertisements were uploaded without permission of the copyright holders. A YouTube spokesperson stated that while the policy itself was not new, the service had “improved the notification and appeal process to ensure better communication to our creators”. In May 2007, YouTube launched its Partner Program (YPP), a system based on AdSense which allows the uploader of the video to share the revenue produced by advertising on the site. The video was retracted after it was found that the ads had been triggered by the use of copyrighted content in the video. The Guardian newspaper, as well as other major British and U.S. brands, similarly suspended their advertising on YouTube in response to their advertising appearing near offensive content. In March 2007, it struck a deal with the BBC for three channels with BBC content, one for news and two for entertainment.

First released on February 15, 2015, as an Android and iOS mobile app, the app has since been released for LG, Samsung, and Sony smart TVs, as well as for Android TV. As of June 2017update, the first season of YouTube Originals had received 250 million views in total. In 2012, clicking on the image of a DVD next to the site logo led to a video about a purported option to order every YouTube video for home delivery on DVD. The next year, the site celebrated its “100th anniversary” with a range of sepia-toned silent, early 1900s-style films, including a parody of Keyboard Cat.

  • It offers advertising-free streaming, access to original programming, and background and offline video playback on mobile devices.
  • The next year, when clicking on a video on the main page, the whole page turned upside down, which YouTube claimed was a “new layout”.
  • The decision of Alphabet to bring back YouTube creators who engaged in misinformation was criticized for prioritizing “free expression” over “facts”.
  • YouTube’s owner Google announced in November 2015 that they would help cover the legal cost in select cases where they believe fair use defenses apply.
  • YouTube also released YouTube Music, a third app oriented towards streaming and discovering the music content hosted on the YouTube platform.

On February 28, 2017, in a press announcement held at YouTube Space Los Angeles, YouTube announced YouTube TV, an over-the-top MVPD-style subscription service that would be available for United States customers at a price of US$65 per month. In March 2021, Google announced plans to gradually deprecate the Google Play Movies & TV app, and eventually migrate all users to the YouTube app’s Movies & TV store to view, rent and purchase movies and TV shows (first affecting Roku, Samsung, LG, and Vizio smart TV users on July 15). It offers advertising-free streaming, access to original programming, and background and offline video playback on mobile devices.

YouTube has enabled people to more directly engage with government, such as in the CNN/YouTube presidential debates (2007) in which ordinary people submitted questions to U.S. presidential candidates via YouTube video, with a techPresident co-founder saying that Internet video was changing the political landscape. The study also concluded that YouTube was becoming an important platform by which people acquire news. A Pew Research Center study reported the development of “visual journalism”, in which citizen eyewitnesses and established news organizations share in content creation. By early 2013, Billboard had announced that it was factoring YouTube streaming data into calculation of the Billboard Hot 100 and related genre charts.

On October 9, 2006, Google announced that they had acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock. The choice of the name youtube.com led to problems for a similarly named website, utube.com. Despite eventually being taken down, these duplicate uploads of the skit helped popularize YouTube’s reach and led to the upload of more third-party content.

In 2020, Roku removed the YouTube TV app from its streaming store after the two companies were unable to reach an agreement. After a 2018 complaint alleging violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the company was fined $170 million by the FTC for collecting personal information from minors under the age of 13. In response to EU officials requesting that such services reduce bandwidth to make sure medical entities had sufficient bandwidth to share information, YouTube and Netflix said they would reduce streaming quality for at least thirty days as to cut bandwidth use of their services by 25% to comply with the EU’s request.

  • That year, the company simplified its interface to increase the time users would spend on the site.
  • From Q to Q3 2024, YouTube’s combined revenue from advertising and subscriptions exceeded $50 billion.
  • In October 2024, a Russian court fined Google 2 undecillion rubles (equivalent to US$20 decillion) for restricting Russian state media channels on YouTube.
  • Three successful complaints for copyright infringement against a user account will result in the account and all of its uploaded videos being deleted.
  • Google’s acquisition launched newfound interest in video-sharing sites; IAC, which now owned Vimeo, focused on supporting the content creators to distinguish itself from YouTube.

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YouTube also released YouTube Music, a third app oriented towards streaming and discovering the music content hosted on the YouTube platform. In 2013, YouTube launched a pilot program for content providers to offer premium, subscription-based channels. By 2010, the company had reached a market share of around 43% and more than 14 billion views of videos, according to comScore.

Platform

In April 2017, YouTube set an eligibility requirement of 10,000 lifetime views for a paid subscription. Usually, no more than half of the eligible videos have a pre-roll advertisement, due to a lack of interested advertisers. According to TubeMogul, in 2013 a pre-roll advertisement on YouTube (one that is shown before the video starts) cost advertisers on average $7.60 per 1000 views. Google stated that it had “begun an extensive review of our advertising policies and have made a public commitment to put in place changes that give brands more control over where their ads appear”.

YouTube Movies & TV is a video on demand (VOD) service that offers movies and television shows for purchase or rental, depending on availability, along with a selection of movies (encompassing between 100 and 500 titles overall) that are free to stream, with interspersed ad breaks. On May 22, 2018, the music streaming platform named “YouTube Music” was launched for people who mostly listen to music on YouTube. As of September 2019, the app is available in 69 countries, including Hong Kong and Macau, and one province.

Businesses, schools, government agencies, and other private institutions often block social media sites, including YouTube, due to its bandwidth limitations and the site’s potential for distraction. In May 2024, YouTube introduced Playables, a set of around 75 free-to-play games that can be played on the platform. Starting with the Oculus Quest, the app was updated for compatibility with mixed-reality passthrough modes on VR headsets. In November 2016, YouTube released YouTube VR, a dedicated version with an interface for VR devices, for Google’s Daydream mobile VR platform on Android. On May 25, 2023, YouTube announced that they would be shutting down this feature on June 26, 2023. On October 15, 2024, the platform officially extended the length of shorts to 3 minutes.

Creators are taking over TV – here are 10 tips

During the COVID-19 pandemic, when most of the world was under stay-at-home orders, usage of services like YouTube significantly increased. YouTube released a mobile app known as YouTube Kids in 2015, which was designed to provide an experience optimized for children. Through this period, YouTube tried several new ways to generate revenue beyond advertisements.

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YouTube officially launched the “polymer” redesign of its user interfaces based on Material Design language as its default, as well as a redesigned logo that is built around the service’s play button emblem in August 2017. The lawsuit was filed due to alleged copyright infringement of Viacom’s material by YouTube. That year, the company again changed its interface and at the same time, introduced a new logo with a darker shade of red. It was at this time that YouTube adopted the slogan “Broadcast Yourself”.The company experienced rapid growth.

Video categories on YouTube include music videos, video clips, news, short and feature films, songs, documentaries, movie trailers, teasers, TV spots, live streams, vlogs, and more. From Q to Q3 2024, YouTube’s combined revenue from advertising and subscriptions exceeded $50 billion. In January 2024, YouTube had more than 2.7 billion monthly active users, who collectively watched more than one billion hours of videos every day.