Friday Fun Facts About YouTube

Where would we be without YouTube? I learned how to balance the ceiling fan in my bedroom. How to play Hotel California on the guitar. How to teach the dog to sit up and beg and use the dog door. How to do all kinds of cool stuff in Word, Excel, Photoshop, PowerPoint and other computer programs. Not to mention reliving every standup comic, funny movie clip or golden oldie’s songs from my high school days. YouTube is an amazing phenomenon.

Chad Hurley, Steven Chen and Jawed Karim registered the YouTube domain name in February 2005. It officially launched ten months later in December. Eighteen months later the trio sold YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion in stock options. Hurley walked away with $334 million, Chen $310 million and Karim $66 million. Not bad for a year and a half of work. Here are some fun facts about this amazing web site.

Fun “YouTube” Facts

YouTube visitor traffic tripled three times in the first year ending with over 38 million visitors.
The top three Internet sites are Google, Facebook and YouTube. Making YouTube the second largest search engine on the Internet.
YouTube has more visitor searches than Bing, Yahoo and Ask combined.
YouTube demographics attract mostly 12-17 year olds. Forty-four percent are female, 56 percent male.
In 2013, more than 72 hours of video were uploaded to the site every minute or ten years of content every single day.
To view all the video seen in a month on YouTube would take a single person 450,000 years to watch it all.
In 2012, YouTube recorded 46,296 video views per second. (Over 4 billion each day.)
YouTube is not welcomed universally. Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Pakistan, Syria, Tajikistan and Turkey have all rejected YouTube.
Six billion hours of video are watched each month on YouTube. Or, about one hour each for every man woman and child on the planet.
Running YouTube is not cheap. The bean counters get bills totaling as high as $5-$6 million dollars a month. And you thought you lived from paycheck to paycheck.
You’ll find YouTube used everywhere. Over 150 years of YouTube videos are watched on Facebook each day and over 400 Twitter tweets per minute contain a YouTube video.

Some Final Thoughts

I wonder if you are thinking the same thing I am when you read some of these amazing numbers. Six billion hours watched each month? A site with more monthly users than the entire population of Europe?

We might have checked with the YouTube guys before trying to sign up an anemic — by YouTube standards — 7 million health insurance users over a six-month period. I’m also curious why no one has put up a “How to Sign Up for The Affordable Care Act” on YouTube, at least not one that I could find that was government sanctioned. If you have a link from one for signing up on Healthcare.gov please paste it in the comments section.

Maybe they have the web site designers also doing the video. What’s your favorite YouTube video?