YouTube Discoveries

YouTube is awesome. Amazing. Huge. Ginormous. If you want to see a commercial, trailer, clip from a movie, band, instructions ... YouTube most likely has it. Heck, I even learned how to knit from YouTube. It has become one of the biggest ways to discover bands and has helped musicians with their fanbase. In fact, when we take a look at the 2010 music website heat map, you can see how much YouTube affects the music industry. Red means negative growth; green means positive growth in 2010. In February 2010, it was reported that 31% of YouTube videos were music - roughly one out of every three.

Piquing your interest? Take a look at these interesting things about YouTube:

• YouTube was created by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim in 2005. These three founders knew each other from working together on another start-up. PayPal. YouTube was initially funded by bonuses following the eBay buy-out of PayPal. So we can thank the business of PayPal for creating YouTube.
• YouTube was originally thought up of to be a video dating site, dubbed "Tune In Hook Up" and was said to be influenced by HotorNot. The three founders decided to not go that route, and YouTube was actually created from the outcome of two different events: Karim's inability to find Janet Jackson's 'wardrobe malfunction,' and when Hurley and Chen were unable to share video footage of a dinner party to do e-mail attachment limitations. 
• YouTube's domain name was registered on Valentine's Day in 2005. However, Universal Tube and Rollform Equipment had a domain name registered as utube.com and this confusion led to utube suing YouTube. The claims were dismissed, and utube.com changed to utubeonline.com. utube.com is now a video-themed landing page for badspellers.
• The first ever YouTube video was shot at the San Diego zoo by Yakov Lapitsky and shows co-founder Jawed Karim talking about elephant's long trunks. Obviously not very interesting, but it still has racked up over 4 million views since its debut on April 23, 2005.

• The first "Rickroll" appeared on YouTube in 2007. It is apparently the evolution of a 4chan prank that originally "duckrolled" users via links that led to a duck on wheels. The Rickroll has now become one of the most common online practical jokes. Back in 2008, 18 million people had been "Rickrolled."
• YouTube pranks its users every single year on April Fools Day. For the first April Fools joke, every video was switched to a Rickroll. In 2009, the site had been turned upside down. In 2010, colors in videos were switched to text. Who knows what those tricksters are planning for 2011. 
• As of February 2011, YouTube has a reported number of 490 million users worldwide per month, which racks up 92 billion page views per month. We spend, on average, 2.9 billion hours on the site per month, which totals to be over 325,000 years. 
• There are over 400 tweets per minute containing a link to a YouTube video. There are 150 years worth of YouTube videos being shared and watched on Facebook every single day. 
• The most viewed video in YouTube is 'Charlie Bit My Finger' with over 282,151,886 views.  These numbers don't count music videos (due to licensing restrictions, music videos are often only shown in the U.S.). With music videos including, Justin Bieber wins with his "Baby" video receiving over 466 million views and counting.
• YouTube has a hidden snake-esque game that you can play while watching any video. Head on over to YouTube, click on any video, push 'pause,' hit the up and left arrows at the same time, and enjoy. But I'm warning you, it's pretty tough with how fast the snake moves. 

peace and love.
kails.