SAN FRANCISCO
Exactly a decade ago Thursay, the first video clip was shared on YouTube, which has grown into an online media titan.
On April 23, 2005, YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim uploaded “Me at the zoo,” a 19-second clip of Karim speaking in front of elephants at the San Diego Zoo. While the video quality is poor and the content pedestrian, the video marked the beginning of a content revolution.
“Me at the zoo” has received more than 19 million views and north of 130,000 comments in the intervening 10 years.
YouTube has impacted how the world experiences media and has not only disrupted the film and television industries, but also fields such as music. A little more than a year after Karim uploaded “Me at the zoo,” Google bought the service for $1.65 billion.
Currently, YouTube receives about 800 million unique users a month and estimates that about 300 hours of new content is uploaded every minute. It has launched the careers of several celebrities, including pop sensation Justin Bieber and surprise South Korean star Psy, whose video for “Gangnum Style” holds onto the prize of most viewed YouTube video with an astounding 2.3 billion views.
Although it has dominated the world of Internet video for years, YouTube could be facing a rocky future as Facebook, Google’s Silicon Valley foe, sees continued growth for the social network’s foray into video.
During an earnings call Wednesday, Facebook executives announced that users were watching 4 billion videos a day, up from 3 billion reported in January and 1 billion last September. The new number is evidence that Facebook’s video project is exploding in popularity and shows that the site is a potential danger to YouTube’s future growth.
Google is fairly tight-lipped about how many YouTube videos are viewed each day, but claimed in early 2012 – seven years after Karim uploaded “Me at the zoo” – that it had passed the 4 billion views per day mark.
