YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. YouTube was created in mid-February 2005 by three former PayPal employees.[1] The San Bruno-based service uses Adobe Flash technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips and music videos, as well as amateur content such as videoblogging and short original videos. In October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had reached a deal to acquire the company for US$1.65 billion in Google stock. The deal closed on November 13, 2006.[2]
Unregistered users can watch most videos on the site, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos. Some videos are available only to users of age 18 or older (e.g. videos containing potentially offensive content). The uploading of videos containing pornography, nudity, defamation, harassment, commercial advertisements and material encouraging criminal conduct is prohibited. Related videos, determined by title and tags, appear onscreen to the right of a given video. In YouTube's second year, functions were added to enhance user ability to post video 'responses' and subscribe to content feeds.
Few statistics are publicly available regarding the number of videos on YouTube. However, in July 2006, the company revealed that more than 100 million videos were being watched every day, and 2.5 billion videos were watched in June 2006. 50,000 videos were being added per day in May 2006, and this increased to 65,000 by July.[3] In January 2008 alone, nearly 79 million users watched over 3 billion videos on YouTube.[4]
In August 2006, The Wall Street Journal published an article revealing that YouTube was hosting about 6.1 million videos (requiring about 45 terabytes of storage space), and had about 500,000 user accounts.[5] As of April 9, 2008, a YouTube search returns about 83.4 million videos and 3.75 million user channels.[6][7]
YouTube is currently not profitable, with its revenues being noted as "immaterial" by Google in a regulatory filing.[4] Its bandwidth costs are estimated at approximately $1 million a day.[4] It is estimated that in 2007, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000.History
Main article: History of YouTube
Domain name problem
YouTube's immense success has unintentionally affected the business of an American company, Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corp., whose website, utube.com, was frequently overloaded and shut down by extremely high numbers of visitors unsure about the spelling of YouTube's domain name, but now utube.com is once again operational.[9] At the beginning of November 2006, Universal Tube filed suit in federal court against YouTube,[10] requesting that the youtube.com domain be transferred to them.[11] Since then the web address utube.com has been sold to a YouTube copycat site, while Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment has moved to utubeonline.com.
Recent events
Political campaigning
Political candidates for the 2008 U.S. Presidential election have been using YouTube as an outlet for advertising their candidacies. Voters can view candidate statements and make videos supporting (or opposing) presidential candidates (e.g., videos for Ron Paul, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden).[12] [13] Third Party presidential candidates have also made extensive use of YouTube. Libertarian Steve Kubby's campaign debuted a short animated film, featuring the faces and voices of campaign contributors who financed its production, on YouTube on September 29th, 2007.[14] The U.S. media has often commented that YouTube played a significant role in the 2006 defeat of Republican Senator George Allen due to a video clip of him making allegedly racist remarks that was continuously replayed by YouTube viewers during the campaign.[15] [16] [17] [18] [19] Political commentators such as Ja
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