• Five Years In, YouTube Is Now Streaming Two Billion Views Per Day

    Sunday, May 16th, 2010

    Jason Kincaid currently works as a writer at TechCrunch. He grew up in Danville, California and later relocated to UCLA in Los Angeles, California, where he studied biology with a minor in ‘Society and Genetics’. You can reach him at jkincaidtc@gmail.com (he has other addresses too, so don’t worry if you have a different one). → Learn More

    It’s hard to believe, but it’s been five years since YouTube launched and changed the way people share video online (it was acquired by Google a year and a half later). To celebrate its birthday, YouTube has just announced a major new milestone: it’s streaming a whopping two billion views per day (the company notes that this is “nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major US television networks combined”).

    To help commemorate the occasion, YouTube is also launching a new channel of videos called “My YouTube Story”, which includes a collection of clips featuring people around the world talking about how YouTube has changed their lives. The initial batch of clips were filmed by documentary filmmaker Stephen Higgins, and some of them are quite touching. YouTube users can upload their own video stories as well; YouTube will be plotting these videos on a global map, and will also offer an interactive timeline of clips.

    We should point out that YouTube announced it had passed 1 billion views a day in October 2009, but that number was probably a bit lower than the actual figure —  we had reported that it had crossed 1.2 billion views a day the previous June.

    YouTube has also compiled some stats and timelines as it reflects on its first five years.

    Here are the site’s most current stats:

    2 Billion views a day
    3rd most visited website (Alexa)
    Localized in 23 countries across 24 different languages
    15 The average number of minutes people spend on the site each day
    24 Hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute
    45 Million home page impressions every day Update: YouTube has clarified that this is the number of daily impressions in the US alone
    70% of YouTube traffic comes from outside the U.S.
    100 Years of video scanned by copyright managent technology, Content ID, every day
    1700 Years it would take you to watch the hundreds of millions of videos on YouTube

    Here are some other goodies YouTube is sharing:

    The First YouTube Homepage, 2005

    A Brief History of YouTube

    Key Milestones

    First video uploaded to the site (April 2005)
    Ronaldinho video is first to reach 1 million views(July 2006)
    Google acquires YouTube (October 2006)
    CNN/YouTube debates (June 2007)
    YouTube mobile site launches (January 2008)
    YouTube Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall (April 2009)

    Product Milestones
    YouTube enables embeds on other sites (June 2005)
    Partner Program launches (December 2007)
    InVideo Ads launches (August 2007)
    Content ID launches (October 2007)
    YouTube videos available in HD (December 2008)
    Shows and Movies (April 2009)
    YouTube XL (June 2009)
    YouTube Direct (November 2009)
    HTML5 Supported Videos (January 2010)

    Top 5 Most Viewed Videos of all time
    Lady Gaga Bad Romance with 196,115,524 views
    Charlie bit my finger with 185,714,255 views
    Evolution of Dance with 142,679,738 views
    Miley Cyrus – 7 Things with 117,413,641
    Pitbull – I Know You Want Me with 118,410,161

    Top 5 Most Subscribed Partners
    nigahiga with 2,186,108 subscribers
    Fred with 1,721,0095 subscribers
    ShaneDawsonTV with 1,486,594
    smosh with 1,461,046 subscribers
    RayWilliamJohnson with 1,223,753 subscribers


    Company: YouTube
    Website: youtube.com
    Launch Date: February 2005
    Funding: $11.5M

    YouTube provides a platform for you to create, connect and discover the world’s videos. The company recently redesigned the site around its hundreds of millions of channels. Partners from major movie studios, record labels, web original creators, viral stars, and millions more all have channels on YouTube. YouTube is predominantly an ad-supported platform, but also offers rental options for a growing number of movie titles. YouTube was founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who...

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