10 Interesting Facts About YouTube

#1 The glorious history of YouTube

YouTube began when three former PayPal employees started to create a video-sharing website on which users could upload, share, and view videos. The Internet domain name "youtube.com" was activated on February 14, 2005.YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal.

#2 Google bought YouTube

In October 2006, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in stocks, just18 months after YouTube’s creation. Karim received $66 million in Google stock, Chen received $310 million, and Hurley received $334 million.

#3 Domain name YouTube.com was registered on Valentine’s Day

The domain name YouTube.com was registered on Valentine’s Day in 2005.The domain name caused a huge misunderstanding for Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment. Its company domain, “utube.com,” was overwhelmed with traffic from people that tried to spell the video site’s name phonetically.

#4 The first video on YouTube

The first video on YouTube is of one of the co-founders Jawed Karim talking about elephant’s trunks titled “Me at the Zoo” shot at the San Diego Zoo.The first video has received over 4.8 million views.

#5 April Fools!

Since 2008, YouTube has featured an April Fools' Day prank on April 1 of every year. The first prank, known as "rickrolling," remains a classic: The featured videos on YouTube's main page linked to the music video for Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up." From turning the site upside-down in 2009 to allowing users to submit ideas for memes in 2014, YouTube knows how to pull a great prank.

#6 Surprising stats

YouTube says users worldwide upload 100 hours of video each minute, and more than 6 billion hours of video are watched each month. More than 1 billion unique users visit YouTube each month, and 80 percent of traffic comes from outside the U.S.

#7 Money Money Money

More than a 1 million creators from over 30 countries are earning money from their YouTube videos. 75% of YouTube in-stream ads are now skippable.Advertisers were estimated to have spent $5.60 billion on YouTube in 2013.YouTube videos influence the purchasing decisions of 53% of all consumers in the U.S. Major brands only generate 3% of the 14.9 billion beauty-related video views on YouTube.

#8 YouTube's Social Stats

Social media-related YouTube stats are just as impressive. YouTube says that on average there are more than 400 tweets per minute containing a YouTube link. Meanwhile, over on Facebook over 150 years worth of YouTube videos are watched every single day.

#9 Paid subscription

In 2013, Google said it would start offering paid subscription content of certain YouTube channels. The subscription-only videos will include up to 50 YouTube channels. Users will pay $1.99 a month to subscribe to certain channels.

#10 Other facts

Millions of subscriptions happen each day.

Millions of videos are favorited every day.

YouTube mobile gets over 100 million views a day.

The YouTube player is embedded across tens of millions of websites.