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Founders - YouTube was founded in 2005 by Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley, and Steve Chen. They were all working at PayPal at the time.

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The story behind YouTube - Reportedly, Hurley and Chen developed YouTube after they have failed to share videos of a dinner party with Karim, who was unable to attend.

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Football and a natural disaster - Karim was also inspired by both Janet Jackson's exposed breast incident during the 2004 Super Bowl, and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. He was unable to easily find videos of either event online.

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Video dating? - Chen and Hurley have said that, originally, YouTube was supposed to be a video version of an online dating service, inspired by the website Hot or Not, where users rate each other's photos based on attractiveness.

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First video - On February 14, 2005, the domain name www.youtube.com was activated. The first video ever uploaded onto YouTube was called 'Me at the zoo.' The video features co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo, and was uploaded on April 23, 2005.

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One million views - The first video to ever reach one million views on YouTube was a Nike advertisement featuring Brazilian soccer star Ronaldinho, this in November 2005.

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Google buys YouTube - In 2006, Google acquired YouTube for US$1.65 billion.

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Number 2 in the world - YouTube is the second-most visited website on the Internet, with Google taking the top spot.

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Content upload - Over 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every single minute.

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Languages - YouTube is available in some 80 languages. This covers about 95% of all Internet users around the world.

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Local versions - YouTube serves over 91 countries worldwide.

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Logged-in visitors -

Over two billion users log into YouTube each month.

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Devices - More than 70% of YouTube users watch content on mobile devices.

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Subscribers - Channels with more than one million subscribers grew more than 70% year-on-year.

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"How to" videos -

"How to" videos are growing 70% year-on-year. The most popular videos are about home improvement, beauty, and cooking.

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Music videos - In 2018, over 90% of the most-watched videos on YouTube were music videos.

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'Gangnam Style' - The music video by South Korean star Psy "broke" the YouTube counter at the time, with over 2,147,483,647 views, this back in 2014. YouTube was unable to count more plays until it changed its programming.

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Most watched -

In early November 2020, 'Baby Shark' bested Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee's 'Despacito' to become the most-watched video on YouTube, currently with over 10.1 billion views.

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Disliked video - For a long time, Justin Bieber's 'Baby' was the video with the most dislikes on YouTube (currently with over 12 million).

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Most disliked video -

But that record was beaten by 'YouTube Rewind 2018' with over 19 million dislikes as of 2021.

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Channels profit - The amount of channels earning six figures per year grew more than 40% year-on-year. And those earning five figures grew more than 50%.

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LEGO - LEGO is one of the most popular branded channels on YouTube, with over 13.8 million subscribers.

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Big channel - Swedish YouTuber PewDiePie has one of the biggest channels on the platform, with over 111 million subscribers.

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Top earner - Ryan's World, a channel by a young kid who reviews toys (among other things), was the top earner of 2020 with US$29.5 million.

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Demographics - The majority of users are aged between 25-44, closely followed by the 25-34 and 35-44 age groups.

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More demographics - The majority of YouTube users are male, making up 62% of the site's user base.

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Copyright -

Over the past few years, YouTube paid out over US$2 billion to content owners.

See also: Celebrities with YouTube channels

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