YouTube is the most popular video sharing website on the entire internet and it the third most visited website after Google and Facebook. YouTube is a great source of knowledge, entertainment and other interesting videos. It is the best platform for Vloggers (Video Bloggers) and it is being used by all types of people. From students to Scientists and from Housewives to Celebrities, all are under the influence of this great video website.
People get on to YouTube to find funny videos, missed TV shows, to learn about their field of interest. Some people are even getting famous by uploading their videos on YouTube. YouTube has become everyone’s favorite and everyone who uses the internet knows about it and spends at least an hour of the Week on YouTube.
The possibilities are enormous, you can listen to any of your favorite songs, watch your favorite funny videos without the need to see a commercial after periods of time (Ads on YouTube appear only before the Video for few seconds and do not disturb you in middle of the video).
Ok, enough praising of YouTube. Lets talk about “How to use YouTube?”
Well, most of you will say that it is damn easy, just go to the website and search for a video and watch it and if you want to comment or like then you need to have a Google account. Login and enjoy.
In this article we will be discussing about the history, features and developments related to our favorite video website (I am not talking those videos).
Contents
The Start
The history of YouTube starts when three former PayPal employees started working on a website that allowed people to share videos with the world. They started with activating the domain name “www.youtube.com” on the 14th of February, 2005 (On Valentine’s Day?). The website was designed and developed in next few months.
Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim were the main people behind this great idea. We won’t talk about the history of these people as we need to focus on knowing about YouTube.
People were offered a preview of the next big thing in the May of that year, almost six months before YouTube was officially available to the world. YouTube was funded from various sources.
Do you know the first video ever uploaded on YouTube was this one. It was a video of Jawed Karim and it was shot by Yakov Lapitsky at the San Diego Zoo.
Rising Days
When people were enjoying the summers of 2006, employees were concerned about meeting the growing demand for the website. YouTube was among the fastest growing websites on the internet accompanied by Facebook.
The site was getting over 65,000 video Uploads and over 100 million videos were viewed everyday in July. At that time YouTube was ranked 5th most popular website on Alexa. The website was getting over 20 million unique visitors every month. According to some surveys it was found that most of the visitors were teenagers of the age group 12 to 17 years.
Out of those millions of visitors on YouTube is was found that 44% visitors were females and 56% were males.
YouTube got into earning revenue in the June of 2006. It entered into marketing and advertising by making partnership with NBC.
Google showed interest
In the same year (2006) when YouTube was getting famous like no other website ever did. On the 9th of October 2006, YouTube was sold to Google for US$1.6 billion. Even then YouTube was working independent of Google and was being run by its founders and 60+ employees.
Okay, so now when we have discussed about the history of YouTube and how it became what is now. We will now proceed to know more of the insights of YouTube and how it is used.
What Parents need to know about YouTube?
Parents need to know some points about YouTube that are meant to be taken in consideration. As a parent you need to know that YouTube is a community driven website and it depends upon the viewers of the website to flag content that violates YouTube terms of services, such content counts brutal violence, sexual content or misleading videos etc. Their are millions of videos on YouTube that are not age-appropriate for kids. So, it is the duty of parents to keep an eye on what their child is viewing on YouTube. Children these days just love YouTube, they use it for keeping up with the modern culture. They watch educational videos to Musical videos to homemade videos of their friends and family too.
Some Awesome features that make it this big
Before going any further you need to know about some words associated with YouTube.
Channels: When you become a member of YouTube, you’ll be assigned a personal channel of your own. On that channel people will be able to see the videos that you upload and the people you’ve subscribed to and what videos you have liked etc. It is actually your personal description through which people who visit your website can learn about you and if they like you then they can subscribe to you. People can visit your channel by clicking on your username and you can visit their channel by clicking on their username.
Now Read about these features
Creating Playlists: This feature is one of my favorite ones. All you need to have is an account on YouTube, then you can group similar or your favorite videos together to create a playlist. Then you can play them in specific order on you channel’s page.
Opting Out of Advertisements: Showing ads on your videos can fetch you some money but it is mostly like that people don’t like videos which show ads. So, you can opt out of ads to give your viewers a better experience.
Monetization of Videos: When you cross a certain number of views on your video then you’ll get an E-mail from Google asking if you want to monetize your videos or not. If you do it, you’ll be making money out of your videos.
Create a Watch List: Suppose you don’t have time to watch a video on YouTube and you want to watch it later. You can add it to Watch later list simply.
Upload a Video: I don’t know why I am putting this point at the last but yeah ! It is the best feature of YouTube, anyone is allowed to upload a video and share it with the world.
Conclusion
YouTube is the best video sharing website ever and it will always be.
