When people want to watch videos, YouTube is one of the go-to places. Where else can you find an endless stream of videos that covers all types and genres from different cultures and countries? On the platform, there are movies, documentaries, music videos, vlogs, educational content, gaming content, live streams, and many more. There are at least 1,000 videos for each of these categories. It’s like a bottomless chest that contains all the treasures in the world. You will never get bored since you can always find something that could entertain you.
But YouTube is not only for watchers. It is also a place for people who love producing videos. Professionals, aspiring creators, companies, and individuals – all of these converge on YouTube. On one side, there are the likes of Disney and Fox Entertainment, who are already known providers of video entertainment. Then on another, there are the likes of Smosh – an organization that started on YouTube. Of course, there’s also PewDiePie and Mr. Beast, who made their names big through their videos on the platform. Aside from these, companies can leverage the platform’s reach to grow their businesses.
Concept: YouTube Views Must Be Counted and Measured
Aside from giving viewers a space to watch videos and creators can upload, YouTube has introduced many features. These features ensure that all users will get the best experience on the platform. Despite rumors and myths, third-party marketing websites allow you to buy real and active YouTube views to show support or go viral as a creator.
To say that YouTube is successful could be an understatement. It has accomplished so much that no single word can describe it. YouTube is the second most visited website and second most popular search engine in the world. The only website standing above it is its parent, Google. Statista Research Department reports that it has 2.3 billion monthly users worldwide – losing only Facebook.
YouTube is a force to reckon with. That’s crystal clear. It’s at the pinnacle of its glory. But that does not mean it has stopped in its journey to reach greater heights. In fact, there’s a series of new features it is rolling out this year to improve its services further. But let’s not focus on that. Here, we’ll take YouTube in the past and at present. Let’s talk about YouTube’s history.
History
As a company that started in 2005, YouTube has quite a long history. It had undergone many changes and evolved so much before it got to where it is today.
Technically, YouTube’s timeline can be divided into four eras. But let’s simplify that to two: its founding year and the era after Google acquired the website.
Genesis: YouTube’s Founding and Initial Growth (2005 -2006)
A trio of former Paypal employees – Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim – founded YouTube in 2005.
According to Karim, two news that went viral online inspired the founding of YouTube. One is the controversy in the Super Bowl 2004 halftime show. The other is the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. Karim said that he struggled to find footage of the incidents. So they thought, “What if there’s a video-sharing website?”
Hurley and Che, however, have their version of the story. They said that YouTube was supposed to be a video-oriented online dating service. They reportedly asked attractive women on Craigslist to upload videos of themselves to YouTube, saying they would pay them $100. That did not work, and it is clear why. That failure led to a change of plans and forced the founders to accept videos of any type. Thus, the YouTube we see today.
A Views Miracle is Born
It was in February 2005 when the founders activated www.youtube.com. The web address chosen for YouTube caused some trouble as it is very similar to an existing website Universal Tube & Rollform equipment used www.utube.com for its website. They sued YouTube in November 2006 because their website gets constantly overloaded by people looking for YouTube. It then changed its web address to www.utubeonline.com to prevent confusion. That shows how popular YouTube was, even in its first year.
The first video on the site was uploaded on April 23, 2005, featuring Karim in a zoo. Then, they released the beta version in May. In November, an ad posted by Nike became the first video to hit one million subscribers. Last, on December 15, 2005, YouTube officially launched. By then, YouTube was seeing 8 million views a day – a noteworthy feat, considering it just launched that year. And, it managed to do that even when clips were limited to 100 megabytes and 30 seconds of footage.
YouTube Under Google (2006 – Present)
Google acquired YouTube on October 9, 2006, for $1.65 billion in Google stock. Based on how YouTube stands today, it could possibly be the best thing that happened to the website.
The company saw rapid growth after the deal was finalized. Here’s an illustration. The Daily Telegraph reported that the bandwidth YouTube consumed in 2007 and the bandwidth the entire internet consumed in 2000 are equal.
In 2010, YouTube simplified its interface to increase the time users would spend on the platform. It was the right call as it reached 14 billion views of videos. A year later, YouTube saw more than 3 billion videos watched each day, with a whole day’s worth of new content uploaded every minute. In 2013 that 48 hours became 100, and then later became 300 in 2014.
However, data revealed that only 30% of the videos get noticed. They account for 99% of the total views on YouTube. Fortunately, that is not the case today.
After many organizational changes, revamps, and new product introductions, we arrived at the YouTube we know today. This is the platform where everyone can upload videos of any length, get noticed, and profit from them. The thought that it was born from a failed attempt to create a dating service is admittedly a little funny. In retrospect, that failure is still actually a success. Because from that rose one of the biggest online platforms today.
The Future of YouTube Views
While we take our mastery and expertise of YouTube and the many views they get serious, it should come with a dire warning that predicting the future of just about anything these days is a hazardous guess at best. However, for those who are interested in what the leading minds on the internet are thinking, fearing, and hoping – we hope this part is for you. With this section, we will delve into our theories of what tomorrow will look like for YouTube and the audience. Just try to keep an open mind as this is all open to our interpretation, based on the available trends and data, and at the end of the day – this is a prediction.
The nearest change will be the mass adoption of VR and AR headsets, and YouTube is well aware of this. In fact, they already have technology that allows you to watch any video on the platform in VR mode. They also have whole sections of content available that were originally filmed and made with and for VR cameras. This gives the content the natural 3D visual that you often get with VR that can only be filmed with the dual-camera setups for bifocal vision and perspective. This will have a drastic impact on the way we use YouTube, as we already laugh at ourselves for being couch potatoes, but this will get even more lethargic. We are going to be bedridden since that’s basically the only place that’s comfortable enough to lay down and use VR headsets for the extended hours of YOuTube we wi want to consume on the daily basis that we already do.
YouTube’s Intelligence Grows with Each YouTube View
The artificial intelligence team that runs and operates YouTube is already the best in the world. This is evident with the current rendition of the YouTube product, which learns so much about ourselves that it may already be ahead of our own consciousness. It’s not unusual to say that in the future, especially at the current rate of growth, will absolutely know more about us than we know about ourselves. Think about that for a minute.
They will know which products, and even which new product categories, that we will like – possibly before they have even been invented. Certainly, they will know which things we will like even before the first VR Advertisement is displayed on the inside of our glasses or headset. Think of how great the advancement of toys and entertainment can potentially be once the unfiltered, maximally released human ingenuity can become once focused on a single retina of absolute adaptation.
They are going to make so much good content, we quite literally can’t even imagine what it will look like. We can’t even imagine what it will feel like. It might incorporate data from our friends and family and inject the faces of our loved ones into the films and TV shows, allowing us to truly feel the fear when our loved ones are acting out a heroic mission or defeating an evil enemy.
Conclusion
We started off with a few mad lads in a garage that put together an app that become worth its digital weight in gold. Now, we have one of the most powerful entertainment and cultural entities of our lives. It shapes politics and the transfer of ideas from one another. Tomorrow, we will literally be teleported into a world where our loved ones are acting out the dramatic scenes of the movies and TV shows we will all gather to see. Hopefully, we can choose which character we are for the TV series before we start a new show. Imagine fighting your brother or sister to be the lead role in the action-adventure drama your family sits down to see after dinner! There is light at the end of the tunnel, friends!