Since its creation in early 2005 by three former PayPal employees (Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim), YouTube has grown exponentially, revolutionizing how people communicate. Prior to 2005, videos were like rare specimens trapped in liquid amber for perpetuity. Some of these videos found life on crass television shows featuring so-called “funniest” videos. YouTube’s innovation was to marry technology with the public’s endless addiction to wacky, mind-numbing videos. Some of YouTube’s statistics are astounding as they are sobering. According to Stephen Jay Gould’s theory of equilibria, it is only a matter of time until the human race evolves into a creature with extremely large eyes, small brain and body, living a complacent, sedentary existence that only T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock could appreciate: “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”
Page views per day: 4 billion
Page views per year: 1 trillion
Number of users: 800 million
Time spent watching videos: 3 billion hours per month
Average time visitor spends watching videos: 15 minutes
Video footage upload: 10 hours of video per second (translating into about five months of videos every hour, 10 years of video every 24 hours!)
Percentage of videos that account for 99% of viewing on the site: 30%
Google’s purchase price: $1.65 billion (October 2006)
YouTube’s revenue: $1.1 billion+ (estimated, 2011)
Number of servers: According to a report by Rich Miller (Data Center Knowledge), Google owns approximately 900,000 servers based on a data center energy usage analysis by Stanford Professor Jonathan Koomey. How many of those are dedicated to YouTube is anyone’s guess since Google is very secretive about its data centers. (Facebook, with a similar amount of users as YouTube, owns over 80,000 servers.) According to Koomey, Google is designing a new storage system called “Spanner” that can automate allocation of resources across 1 to 10 million servers!
YouTube’s first video: “Me at the Zoo” by Jawed Karim filmed by Yakov Lapitsky at the San Diego Zoo in 2005.
YouTube’s most watched music video (all-time): “Psy – Gangnam Style” with 1.4 billion views” in number two position: “Justin Beiber – Baby featuring Ludacris” with over 839 million views*
YouTube’s most watched viral video (all-time): “Charlie bit my finger — Again!” with over 457 million views. Howard Davies-Carr filmed his two boys, Charlie and Harry, back in May of 2007. Howard says the video was “simply an attempt to capture the boys growing up” and wanted to share it with the boys’ godfather. The video has gone on earn the family over $500,000 through advertising.
YouTube’s founder’s favorite video: “Battle at Kruger” This video (65 million views and counting) captures the quintessential essence of YouTube: the priceless eyewitness footage of life as it happens. Filmmakers Buzz Budzinski and Jason Schlosberg capture the spectacular circle of life as it plays out at a rather crowded watering hole located in Kruger National Park, South Africa. The cast of characters includes: a herd of cape buffalo, a pride of lions, and an opportunistic crocodile; at the center of all the action: a terrified, defenseless calf.
YouTube’s most annoying video: Just about any video featuring the Kardashians.
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Fur further reading: BattleatKruger.com, Citigroup, NBC Dateline, YouTube, Time (1.30.12), and Wikipedia. http://mashable.com/2012/03/30/charlie-bit-my-finger/
*Numbers cited here are as of March 2013. YouTube posts the most watched video in various categories in their charts section: http://www.youtube.com/charts/videos_views
