YouTube

YouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. YouTube was created in February 2005 by three former PayPal employees. The San Bruno-based service uses Adobe Flash Video technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips and music videos, as well as amateur content such as videoblogging and short original videos. In October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had reached a deal to acquire the company for US$1.65 billion in Google stock. The deal closed on November 13, 2006.

Unregistered users can watch most videos on the site, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos. Some videos are available only to users of age 18 or older (e.g. videos containing potentially offensive content). The uploading of videos containing pornography, nudity, defamation, harassment, commercial advertisements and material encouraging criminal conduct is prohibited. Related videos, determined by title and tags, appear onscreen to the right of a given video. In YouTube's second year, functions were added to enhance user ability to post video 'responses' and subscribe to content feeds.

Few statistics are publicly available regarding the number of videos on YouTube. However, in July 2006, the company revealed that more than 100 million videos were being watched every day, and 2.5 billion videos were watched in June 2006. 50,000 videos were being added per day in May 2006, and this increased to 65,000 by July.In January 2008 alone, nearly 79 million users had made over 3 billion video views.

In August 2006, The Wall Street Journal published an article revealing that YouTube was hosting about 6.1 million videos (requiring about 600 terabytes of storage space), and had about 500,000 user accounts. As of April 9, 2008, a YouTube search returns about 83.4 million videos and 3.75 million user channels. It is estimated that in 2007, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000, and that around 13 hours of video are uploaded every minute. In March 2008, its bandwidth costs were estimated at approximately $1 million a day

As of Q1 2008, YouTube was not profitable, with its revenues in 2007 being noted as "not material" by Google in a regulatory filing Exact revenue or profit numbers are not published, but a June 2008 Forbes magazine article projected the 2008 revenue at $200 million, noting progress in ad sales. At that time, the price for an ad on the YouTube home page was $175,000 per day (plus a $50,000 commitment to buy Google/YouTube ads elsewhere), and a branded channel (distinguished by a customized background) cost advertisers $200,000.