(organ grinder music) - Oh, hello there, young man or lady. Let me tell you the story
of one of your favorite websites as I knew it back in my day. It's story time. SoYouTube is a phenomenon that we have all come to love. For many of us, it's not
only a site that we use to learn things, like how to fix the sink, but it's also the site where we consume most of our entertainment. But even though many of us have made this website part of our everyday lives, very few of us know about its origins or just how big it really is today. So, today, I'm going to give you some little-known information about the website that you've come to love so much. So, here it is. 10 fascinating facts about YouTube you didn't know. Number one is stats and traffic. There are more than 1 billion unique users that visit YouTube every month, so it's no wonder that billions of hours of video get watched daily, making YouTube the Internet's largest video hosting website. But what really makes YouTube unique is that many of the same
people that are consuming this insane amount of content are the same people creating it. In fact, more than 300
hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. To put that into context,
the amount of video uploaded to the website
every month is more than the three major U.S. television
networks have created in the last 60 years. While YouTube was created
and is hosted in the U.S., more than 80% of traffic
that comes to the website is from outside of the U.S., meaning that all of those
views allow people like me to make a living off of what they love, which is making videos. So, thank you for watching no matter where it is: at home, at work, on your phone on the toilet. Some of you are watching this video right now on the pooper. I know. Number two is origins. YouTube was founded in February of 2005 by three early PayPal employees: Steven Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim. Hurley joined the other founders after he read an article about the startup in Wired magazine. He emailed them about a job, after which he was brought on to design the logo for the company, which is still used today. Interestingly, the initial
seed money for YouTube came from when eBay bought PayPal and provided bonuses to the three guys. When it started to become popular, the choice of the name YouTube.com became a huge problem
for a similarly named website UTube.com. The site's owner, Universal
Tube & Rollform Equipment filed a lawsuit against
YouTube in November of 2006 after being regularly overloaded by people looking for the site. Universal Tube has since changed the name of their website
to UTubeOnline.com. Could you imagine if any
of the viral sensations that happened now occurred back then? That would be pretty confusing. "Hey Jimmy, this guy's emailing me "about a Harlem Shake. "Do we carry one of those?" Number three is YouTube
as a dating service. Not many people know that YouTube actually first started as
a video dating service. Originally called Tune In and Hook Up, the website was heavily influenced by the website Hot or Not. Although it operated in the same fashion, the three founders decided not to go with the dating site idea, but decided to keep the
video portion of it. Then, two important events occurred that forever shaped what
we would come to know as YouTube. The first event was when
Karim was unable to find the infamous Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction video online. The second event was when Hurley and Chen were unable to share a
video from a dinner party with friends due to the
email attachment limitations that still exist today. These two important events
made the founders realize that there was a huge untapped potential for video sharing online, and they decided to fill that need. I love how honest they are about how the website started, too. "Well, I couldn't find the
titties I wanted to see "online, so I started a
website that I could use "to watch them titties." Number four is humble beginnings. YouTube offices are known
for being cool places full of free food, drinks, and awesome facilities for employees, but the original YouTube
office, created in 2005, was anything but glamorous. In fact, Chad Hurley's
garage was the foundation for the first-ever YouTube office. They started off slow, but eventually in 2006 were able to move into an office space above a pizzeria near San Mateo, California. It was there that they hired
the first 20 YouTube employees all eager to be a part of something exciting and new. Surprisingly, and embarassingly, in an attempt to popularize the site, the company offered
$100 to attractive girls who posted 10 videos or more on the site. Yeah, that's kinda creepy. The advertisement was
even placed on Craigslist but was completely ignored, leaving YouTube with no responses. What is it about tech nerds and garages, inventors and garages, and bands and garages? I guess if you need to solve something, you just go sleep in your garage. (snap) Boom. Done. Number five is now and then. Before 300 hours of
video was being uploaded to the site every minute, it all started with just one, a 19 second clip called "Me at the Zoo." Shot by Yakov Lapitsky,
a friend of Jawed Karim, it shows Jawed at the San Diego Zoo in front of an elephant enclosure talking about how long their trunks are. Since its upload on April 23, 2005, it has gained a whopping
almost 19 million views. It's the only video on Jawed's channel, yet that channel has gained
over 70,000 subscribers. In 2008, Jawed launched a venture fund called Youniverty Ventures, which helps current and
former university students realize their business ideas. However, Jawed still remains
interested in YouTube and even spoke out agains
the Google+ integration in 2013 that requires users
to have a Google+ account in order to comment on videos, which is something everyone
loved so very much. Well, the first YouTube
video may have been basic, but at least he wasn't
twerking or something. Those were simpler times. Number six is YouTube's purchase. Within just one year of being launched, YouTube became a very
popular video sharing site. This got the attention of Google who saw the potential
that online video had, and in October of 2006,
Google bought YouTube for $1.6 billion in stock from the three founders only 18 months after the site's creation. This worked out quite well because the founders
were just as interested in selling the website
as Google was interested in buying it. At the time, YouTube had been
in multiple legal battles with several media companies over copyright infringement lawsuits. Another reason that the founders were so eager to sell it was
that on top of the lawsuits, despite its popularity,
YouTube was losing money at a rate of $500,000 a month. Of course, Google doesn't
enter any business arrangement with the intention of losing money, so they were the ones to introduce advertising on the platform. Since that purchase, YouTube has grown exponentially, year over year, making it the second biggest search engine just behind Google.com. So, in other words, Google has a monopoly on Internet search. No Microsoft. Don't say Bing. Shut, shut your mouth. Shut your mouth. No one uses it. It's never gonna be a thing. Just stop. Number seven is milestones. You may be curious as to some of the firsts, or milestones on YouTube, so here's some notable ones. The first ever YouTube video to hit 1 million views was Brazilian soccer star Ronaldinho's Nike ad
called "Touch of Gold" after it went viral in 2005. In 2006, NBC became the first
traditional media company to strike a deal with YouTube to put their content on the site. In 2007, YouTube launched
the Partnership Program, which allowed people to get paid for the content that they upload to the site, which of
course, changed everything. In April of 2009, YouTube and Vivendi teamed up to launch the new music video service called Vevo. In November of 2009, high-definition video was finally enabled on the site. In 2010, YouTube began offering movies for rent on the site. In 2011, YouTube Live
was created to enable the website to stream everything from concerts to news coverage. And of course, as of
today, there are thousands of YouTube partners making a living off of the site. It's a good living, as
long as you can get past the troll comments. I know I'm bald, ok, damn! (loud crying) Number eight is research. Over the years, a lot of
research has been done on Youtube, its success, and
how it's affected culture. But, despite all the research collected, it's still not known what makes a video go viral, although humor, genuine emotion, and the human experience all seem to be the most appealing factors. In fact, research concluded
that "going viral" is not a strategy, but
instead, an outcome. They also found that
the success of YouTube came down to four key factors. The service offers video recommendations via the "related video list." Next, is that users
can easily share videos and embed videos on popular websites. The third is that there's
a sense of community and interactivity on the site. And, finally, of course, the incentive of the partnership program. Of course, if there was a fifth, it would be cat videos. A staple of any successful
video sharing site, my friends. Number nine is sharing. YouTube was, in fact, not the
first video sharing website. Started in 1997 by Chase Norlin, ShareYourWorld.com was the first-ever video-sharing website. It was designed to watch and share video over the Internet. The idea was that most people at the time were able to get their hands on digital camera equipment
and produce their own work, so they needed a place to share it. However, because the Internet was still in its infancy at the time, the technology was unable to do much of what YouTube would later be able to do with efficient video
transcoding and high bandwidth. The company ended up dying in 2001, just four years before YouTube, opening up an opportunity
for video sharing on the Internet. I'm not gonna lie, though, I'm actually glad, because it sounds a lot better to say I'm a YouTuber as opposed to I'm a Share Your Worlder. It just doesn't sound right. And number 10 is Easter eggs. One of the least known
features on YouTube, but a favorite to those who know of it, are hidden Easter eggs on the site. If you search the term
"Beam me up Scotty," you'll find the search results beam on to the screen vertically. If you search the term
"Use the force, Luke," the page will shift around and can only be controlled by your mouse. If a video begins buffering, and you don't feel like waiting for it, if you hit the left
arrow, the buffering icon will magically become a game of snake. And one of the most recent Easter eggs is that if you search the term "Do the Harlem Shake," the search results will start dancing to the music, and all of a sudden go crazy doing the actual Harlem Shake. There's also an Easter
egg that if you click right here, a lot of great stuff will come to you in the future. Try it. And that's all for this time, guys. Thanks so much for watching. As always, if you enjoyed this video, remember to give that like button a click, and if you'd like to see
future videos from me, be sure to click that red subscribe button because I upload every
Tuesday and Saturday. I love you guys. I hope you have a great day, and I will see you this Saturday with a brand new video. Peace. (Bugle Horn Music) (Electronic Music)
I may not be a huge fan of YouTube. However, this video actually has some cool information regarding its history and some of its Easter eggs.
Also, a polite heads up as the video was created in 2015.
All the best.
peace...