YouTube Turns 5 Years Old, Invites 2 Billion to Party
By Carl Franzen (May 17, 2010 )
It's the third-most-visited website in the world (behind Google and Facebook), drawing 2 billion-plus viewers daily with its mind-boggling cache of 1,700 years worth of video footage of silly animals, elaborate dance routines and other bizarre, disturbing and amazing phenomena.
Watch YouTube's greatest hits.
Not bad for a company created out of a garage five years ago with little more than a clever idea and a catchy name: YouTube.
Now Google, which purchased the website for a staggering $1.65 billion in 2006, is pulling out all the stops to commemorate YouTube's fifth anniversary this month.
Besides a special logo and triumphant blog post, YouTube has its own "FiveYear" birthday channel, replete with sentimental video homages to the site at its half-decade mark, plus guest-curated compilations of "most essential" clips hosted by the likes of Katie Couric and Conan O'Brien.
"What started as a site for bedroom vloggers and viral videos has evolved into a global platform that supports HD and 3D, broadcasts entire sports seasons live to 200+ countries," the YouTube team wrote on its blog Sunday, when the anniversary page was launched.
Founded by three former employees of the online payment service PayPal, YouTube began as a registered domain address, www.youtube.com, in February 2005. The first video -- "Me at the Zoo," showing co-founder Jawed Karim chatting in front of the elephants at the San Diego Zoo -- was uploaded in late April, but the site was not accessible for public use until May.
According to YouTube co-founder and CEO Chad Hurley, PayPal was just one source of inspiration for the founders. "The same way Flickr created a photo community, we wanted to create a video community," Hurley said in an interview with USA Today's TechnologyLive blog.
From those humble beginnings, YouTube has grown into the premier destination for online video sharing, now logging some 2 billion page views a day -- "nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major U.S. television networks combined," asserts the YouTube blog.
Even so, YouTube is not content to rest on its laurels. Hurley told British newspaper The Telegraph last month that "although YouTube is the most successful video platform, the number of minutes watched, 10 to 15 minutes a day, is small when compared to the five hours watched on the TV set." He went on to say he hoped to erase, if not outright reverse, that disparity in five to 10 years, since "more minutes on our site equals more money."
Indeed, although YouTube bills itself as a "forum for people to connect, inform and inspire others across the globe," the company has faced increasing pressure from shareholders, analysts and observers at large to turn a profit, something it has yet to accomplish but hopes to do for the first time this year.
Since being acquired by Google in 2006, YouTube has actually lost hundreds of millions of dollars every year because of its high operating costs -- namely, maintaining the bandwidth necessary to allow users to upload as much video as they want for free, which currently stands at a rate of 24 hours' worth every minute of the day.
In addition, since a substantial portion of these videos are unauthorized clips from movies and TV programs, YouTube has also been hit by a barrage of copyright lawsuits from companies such as Viacom (which has recently been accused of hiring marketers to secretly upload its own content to the website specifically to support copyright infringement claims).
Several analysts have speculated that YouTube's economics are inherently unsustainable, dooming the website to eventual ruin. But given YouTube's phenomenal growth in viewership and its continued prominence in pop culture -- giving birth to the career of crossover celebrity Justin Bieber, to name one recent example -- others have deemed it a grand slam for Google, financial imbalances aside.
YouTube has lately begun pursuing a variety of innovative revenue-raising strategies, including partnerships with several independent studios to allow for paid rentals of feature films, and with popular Spanish-language TV network Univision to not only upload new programming, but also tack ads onto older, unauthorized Univision clips.
Plus, later this month Google is expected to announce a new TV platform in collaboration with Intel and Sony that will be a "significant breakthrough into the consumer electronics and broadcast industry," in which YouTube is expected to play a major part.
"YouTube is the only place you can put your content on the Web and reach a TV-size audience in every country," said Hunter Walk, YouTube's director of product management, in an interview with the Financial Times.
Moreover, YouTube's Partner Program, started in 2007, has proved eminently profitable for individual content creators, allowing them to take cuts of ad revenue based on the popularity of their videos. Some have even leveraged this program to become millionaires.
Of course, with every success story there are always detractors, and YouTube is no different. Yet in the run-up to the website's five-year anniversary, flak has been coming from a counterintuitive source: "vloggers," or video bloggers, whose very presence is predicated on YouTube.
A few have claimed that in a quest for growth and profitability, YouTube has left them in the dust, allowing their comments sections to be flooded with spam, overlooking them for featured slots and ignoring them on the "FiveYear" channel.
"Celebrate the longtime vloggers like me," demanded vlogger Zennie62 on the San Francisco Chronicle website today. "I've been here since 2006 and a partner since 2007. Because of YouTube I've been on national television a bunch of times and started a new media company. While I owe a lot to YouTube, YouTube owes a lot to me as one of its ambassadors...
"Focus on your small town friends. ... Help us help YouTube."
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