YouTube
YouTube is an American online video sharing platform owned by Google. Accessible worldwide,[note 1] it was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, three former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in San Bruno, California, United States, it is the second most visited website in the world, after Google Search. YouTube has more than 2.5 billion monthly users,[2] who collectively watch more than one billion hours of videos every day.[7] As of May 2019, videos were being uploaded to the platform at a rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute,[8][9] and as of 2021, there were approximately 14 billion videos in total.[9]
For the company's channel on YouTube, see YouTube (channel).Type of business
February 14, 2005
901 Cherry Avenue
San Bruno, California,
Worldwide (excluding blocked countries)
- Neal Mohan (CEO)
- Chad Hurley (advisor)
US$31.5 billion (2023)[1]
Google LLC (2006–present)
- Not required to watch most videos; required for certain tasks such as uploading videos, viewing flagged (18+) videos, creating playlists, liking or disliking videos, and posting comments
February 14, 2005
Active
Uploader holds copyright (standard license); Creative Commons can be selected.
In October 2006, YouTube was purchased by Google for $1.65 billion (equivalent to $2.31 billion in 2023).[10] Google expanded YouTube's business model of generating revenue from advertisements alone, to offering paid content such as movies and exclusive content produced by and for YouTube. It also offers YouTube Premium, a paid subscription option for watching content without ads. YouTube incorporated Google's AdSense program, generating more revenue for both YouTube and approved content creators. In 2022, YouTube's annual advertising revenue increased to $29.2 billion, more than $9 billion higher than in 2020.[1][11]
Since its purchase by Google, YouTube has expanded beyond the core website into mobile apps, network television, and the ability to link with other platforms. Video categories on YouTube include music videos, video clips, news, short and feature films, songs, documentaries, movie and teaser trailers, live streams, vlogs, and more. Most content is generated by individuals, including collaborations between "YouTubers" and corporate sponsors. Established media, news, and entertainment corporations have also created and expanded their visibility to YouTube channels in order to reach greater audiences.
YouTube has had unprecedented social impact, influencing popular culture, internet trends, and creating multimillionaire celebrities. Despite its growth and success, the platform is sometimes criticized for allegedly facilitating the spread of misinformation, the sharing of copyrighted content, routinely violating its users' privacy, enabling censorship, endangering child safety and wellbeing, and for its inconsistent or incorrect implementation of platform guidelines.
Senior leadership
YouTube has been led by a CEO since its founding in 2005, beginning with Chad Hurley, who led the company until 2010. After Google's acquisition of YouTube, the CEO role was retained. Salar Kamangar took over Hurley's position and held the job until 2014. He was replaced by Susan Wojcicki, who later resigned in 2023.[94] The current CEO is Neal Mohan, who was appointed on February 16, 2023.[94]
Features
Video technology
YouTube primarily uses the VP9 and H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video codecs, and the Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP protocol.[98] MPEG-4 Part 2 streams contained within 3GP containers are also provided for low bandwidth connections.[99] By January 2019, YouTube had begun rolling out videos in AV1 format.[100] In 2021 it was reported that the company was considering requiring AV1 in streaming hardware in order to decrease bandwidth and increase quality.[101] Video is usually streamed alongside the Opus and AAC audio codecs.[99]
At launch in 2005, viewing YouTube videos on a personal computer required the Adobe Flash Player plug-in to be installed in the browser.[102] In January 2010, YouTube launched an experimental version of the site that used the built-in multimedia capabilities of Web browsers supporting the HTML5 standard.[103] This allowed videos to be viewed without requiring Adobe Flash Player or any other plug-in to be installed.[104] On January 27, 2015, YouTube announced that HTML5 would be the default playback method on supported browsers.[103] HTML5 video streams use Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (MPEG-DASH), an HTTP-based adaptive bit-rate streaming solution optimizes the bitrate and quality for the available network.[105]
The platform can serve videos at optionally lower resolution levels starting at 144p for smoothening playback in areas and countries with limited Internet speeds, improving compatibility, as well as for the preservation of limited cellular data plans. The resolution can be adjusted automatically based on detected connection speed or set manually.[106][107]
From 2008 to 2017, users could add "annotations" to their videos, such as pop-up text messages and hyperlinks, which allowed for interactive videos. By 2019, all annotations had been removed from videos, breaking some videos that depended on the feature. YouTube introduced standardized widgets intended to replace annotations in a cross-platform manner, including "end screens" (a customizable array of thumbnails for specified videos displayed near the end of the video).[108][109][110]
In 2018, YouTube became an International Standard Name Identifier (ISNI) registry, and announced its intention to begin creating ISNI identifiers to uniquely identify the musicians whose videos it features.[111]
Users can verify their account, normally through a mobile phone, to gain the ability to upload videos up to 12 hours in length, as well as produce live streams.[112][113] Users who have built sufficient channel history and have a good track record of complying with the site's Community Guidelines will also gain access to these aforementioned features as well.[114] When YouTube was launched in 2005, it was possible to upload longer videos, but a 10-minute limit was introduced in March 2006 after YouTube found that the majority of videos exceeding this length were unauthorized uploads of television shows and films.[115] The 10-minute limit was increased to 15 minutes in July 2010.[116] Videos can be at most 256 GB in size or 12 hours, whichever is less.[112] As of 2021, automatic closed captions using speech recognition technology when a video is uploaded are available in 13 languages, and can be machine-translated during playback.[117]
YouTube also offers manual closed captioning as part of its creator studio.[118] YouTube formerly offered a 'Community Captions' feature, where viewers could write and submit captions for public display upon approval by the video uploader, but this was deprecated in September 2020.[119]
YouTube accepts the most common container formats, including MP4, Matroska, FLV, AVI, WebM, 3GP, MPEG-PS, and the QuickTime File Format. Some intermediate video formats (i.e., primarily used for professional video editing, not for final delivery or storage) are also accepted, such as ProRes.[120] YouTube provides recommended encoding settings.[121]
Each video is identified by an eleven-character case-sensitive alphanumerical Base64 string in the Uniform Resource Locator (URL) which can contain letters, digits, an underscore (_), and a dash (-).[122]
In 2018, YouTube added a feature called Premiere which displays a notification to the user mentioning when the video will be available for the first time, like for a live stream but with a prerecorded video. When the scheduled time arrives, the video is aired as a live broadcast with a two-minute countdown. Optionally, a premiere can be initiated immediately.[123]
YouTube has been censored, filtered, or banned for a variety of reasons, including:[590]
Access to specific videos is sometimes prevented due to copyright and intellectual property protection laws (e.g. in Germany), violations of hate speech, and preventing access to videos judged inappropriate for youth,[591] which is also done by YouTube with the YouTube Kids app and with "restricted mode".[592] Businesses, schools, government agencies, and other private institutions often block social media sites, including YouTube, due to its bandwidth limitations[593][594] and the site's potential for distraction.[590][595]
As of 2018, public access to YouTube is blocked in many countries, including China, North Korea, Iran, Turkmenistan,[596] Uzbekistan,[597][598] Tajikistan, Eritrea, Sudan and South Sudan. In some countries, YouTube is blocked for more limited periods of time such as during periods of unrest, the run-up to an election, or in response to upcoming political anniversaries. In cases where the entire site is banned due to one particular video, YouTube will often agree to remove or limit access to that video in order to restore service.[590]
Reports emerged that since October 2019, comments posted with Chinese characters insulting the Chinese Communist Party (共匪 "communist bandit" or 五毛 "50 Cent Party", referring to state-sponsored commentators) were being automatically deleted within 15 seconds.[599]
Specific incidents where YouTube has been blocked include:
