YouTube turns 10: Amazing facts & videos
Imagine owning a company that after only 10 years had one billion customers, with people using the product for hundreds of millions of hours every day in 75 countries and 61 different languages.
That is the reality of YouTube.
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Everybody’s favourite video website just celebrated 10 years since its first video was uploaded.
The 19-second video titled ‘Me at the zoo’ features YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim giving a gripping account of why elephants are cool (apparently it’s because they have “really, really long trunks”), it was uploaded on 23 April, 2005.
With 300 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute of every day, it would take over 1000 years for one person to watch every video currently on YouTube.
South Korean singing sensation Psy’s catchy-but-annoying chart topper ‘Gangnam Style’ holds the record for most-viewed YouTube video with more than 2.3 billion views.
To put this in perspective, the world’s population is only just over seven billion people.
Sadly, Justin Bieber comes in second place with his song ‘Baby’ which has had more than one billion views.
Here are some fun facts on the YouTube anniversary:
• The most viewed video of all time, Gangnam Style, still gets one million views a day
• YouTube can be navigated in 76 different languages, a number that covers 95 per cent of the internet population
• Me at the zoo – by YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim – was the first video uploaded; the second was My Snowboarding Skillz
• Half of YouTube views worldwide are on a mobile device
• The most popular cat on YouTube is the animated Nyan Cat
• On average, creators get more views from outside their home country than within it. Sometimes a lot more – for every one local view of an Australian-made video, there are another nine views overseas
• People around the world have ‘Rickroll’d’ each other more than 70 million times – tricking them into clicking links that lead to the video for Rick Astley’s Never Gonna Give You Up. That’s one ‘Rickroll’ for every person living in London, Tokyo, NYC, Mumbai, Cairo, and Buenos Aires combined
• The countries with the highest per capita YouTube viewership in the world are UAE and Saudi Arabia
• YouTube’s number one non-music video is Charlie Bit My Finger (Again), with more than 800 million views
• Rebecca Black’s Friday is viewed almost three times as much on Fridays as any other day of the week
Rather than devoting the rest of your life and your afterlife to watching endless cat videos and cheesy popstars, here are some of the best and most viral videos on YouTube.
Enjoy the trip down memory lane.
Charlie bit my finger
Views: 817,000,000
Sneezing baby panda
Views: 216,000,000
Laughing baby
Views: 10,000,000
David after the dentist
Views: 128,000,000
Evolution of dance
Views: 290,000,000
OK Go – Here it goes again
Views: 26,000,000
Leave Britney Alone
Views: 49,000,000
Potter puppet pals – the mysterious ticking noise
Views: 159,000,000