YouTube at 20
Twenty years ago today, YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim uploaded a 19 second video titled “Me at the zoo” to the platform. As anyone who follows YouTube knows, it was the first video hosted by the platform.
On its 20th anniversary, YouTube now says that since Karim’s video was posted, more than 20 billion videos have been uploaded (and no, that isn’t a typo).
To mark YouTube’s 20th anniversary, we’re offering you a look at some of our features, statistics, hidden gems, and easter eggs to accompany us throughout the festivities.
Today, it doesn’t need explaining. YouTube is the second most-visited website on Earth, after Google, which bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006.
Every single day, we collectively watch more than a billion hours of YouTube videos. Funny videos … how-to videos … cat videos.
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The most-watched of all? “Baby Shark Dance,” with about 16 billion views.
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Nobody’s monetized it better than Jimmy Donaldson, better known as MrBeast, whose videos of colossal giveaways and physical challenges have made him the most-followed YouTuber of all, with 380 million fans.
I’ve been on @YouTube for 17 years as a creator and 2.5 as an employee. To say it changed my life — and the world — would be a profound understatement. To share your voice, to build a career — careers! — with no gatekeepers, just the willingness to press the upload or go-live button and the creativity to connect with an audience is an every-moment miracle.
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I beat them by about 3 years. I set up a service with QuickTime Streaming Server to integrate with MovableType CMS, I called it BlogTV. I wrote up the tech details as I developed the project, and publicly posted about how I wondered if it could be streamlined and scale up to mainstream levels. And then I did NOT attempt to scale it up. I coulda been YouTube. Yes of course it could have scaled massively, until QTSS was deprecated. Nobody at Apple wanted to maintain the Perl code, I guess.
> with no gatekeepers
Except the "automated" ones that will disable or delete your account and videos with no warning or logical reason, over which YouTube likes to appear to have litle to no control...
I get that he has to say nice things now that he works there, but come on, man. Don't just make things up.
Agree with Kevin Schumacher, there are obviously a lot of things wrong with YouTube, probably the worst being the creators who get shut out of it for no good reason, sometimes losing their income in the process, and they have no real recourse because Google is allergic to actually having humans monitor anything they do.
LOL I remember when a woman shot up the YouTube HQ, she was mad and wanted revenge her fitness influencer channel getting demonetized and YT wouldn't reinstate her. Hey, nobody owes you a living, lady.
Ritchie means "no gatekeepers" in the traditional media sense, where publishers and media owners decide what content they want to show. You don't have that with YouTube; you don't have to convince anyone to publish your stuff. You do it yourself.
@Plume Good point. So what we've come to see with YouTube, Apple's app stores, Patreon, and other sites like that is the new form of gatekeeping that's emerged in the digital world, one where the hammer sometimes falls on you *after* you've established yourself, and often for no good reason. And people still sometimes get demonetized or kicked out for doing things the patron company disapproves of, similar to the original gatekeepers, but again it happens later on, and often via an automated and inaccurate system.
It's certainly different than what we had before, and yes, anyone can get into it, but it's still vital for people to realize that you're still working for a monolithic company who has control over your income and can decide on a whim to end their relationship with you with no recourse for you and no consequences to them. I've been avoiding releasing software in the app store for this reason and so many others, the biggest one being that having that kind of relationship would noticeably reduce my quality of life. It's bad enough being a user much less a content creator.
Mmm.
So why do Google keep artificially promoting (and concealing the nature of) Youtube hits in Google results?
