Hey, We're Social Too! YouTube Passes One Billion Follows, Er, Subscriptions

Friday, October 29th, 2010

Erick Schonfeld is a technology journalist and the former Editor in Chief of TechCrunch. At TechCrunch, he oversaw the editorial content of the site, helped to program the Disrupt conferences and CrunchUps, produced TCTV shows, and wrote daily for the blog. He joined TechCrunch as Co-Editor in 2007, and helped take it from a popular blog to a thriving... → Learn More

Google gets a bad rap for missing the boat on social. You know, all that stuff Facebook and Twitter do with friends, followers, and activity streams. But many of its products have had social features for a long time. YouTube reminds us of this fact by pointing out that people have subscribed to other people’s video channels more than one billion times. They are even celebrating the milestone on the YouTube logo today.

If you think about it, the subscribe button on every YouTube video is very much like a follow button on Twitter. By subscribing to another user or video producer, you get all of their new videos in your personalized homepage stream when you are logged in. And you also get an email notification. It’s not quite the same as a status update, but one billion emails a week is quite a lot.

There are 15 video YouTube video producers who have more than one million followers, er subscribers. To encourage more subscriptions, YouTube is releasing a subscribe widget that people can put in their blogs and websites.

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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