The Worlds 3^rd Most Visited Site

YouTube is more than just a video-sharing website. In a very short five years it has become a society changing phenomena alongside internet giants such as Google, Amazon, EBay, Wikipedia, Craigslist, Yahoo, Blogger, Facebook and Twitter. With more than two million views every single day, YouTube also boasts being the third largest website in the world behind only Google and Facebook. Here are some fun stats:

• Three former Paypal employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, created YouTube as a Flickr-style sharing site for videos early 2005.

• The domain name www.youtube.com was activated on February 14, 2005.

• The shared their first video on April 23, 2005. The 19-second shot of Karim at the San Diego Zoo can still be viewed on today.

• YouTube offered the public a beta test of the site in May 2005.

• By the end of 2005, YouTube was sending eight terabytes of data across the Internet – equivalent to the entire contents of a Blockbuster store.

• In July 2006 YouTube was receiving 100 million video views per day.

• November 2006, YouTube, LLC was bought by Google, Inc. for $1.65 billion.

• In April 2009, YouTube even receives a Peabody Award.

• By October 2009, YouTube signs first major TV network deal for catch-up TV programming.

• February 2010, YouTube had live streaming on President Obama.

Today it is estimated that 24 hours of new videos are uploaded every minute with over 70% of the material coming from outside the United States. YouTube estimates that the average person spends a whopping 15 minutes a day on YouTube.

Top 50 Videos

In celebration of YouTube 5^th anniversary this month, TIME magazine put together this fun list of the 50 best videos. Enjoy all the clips here.

About the Author

Nineteen-time author Stefan Swanepoel publishes the annual Swanepoel TRENDS Report and the annual Swanepoel SOCIAL MEDIA Report. His Reports are widely regarded as the leading research on the most important business and technology trends impacting the real estate industry. For more information visit www.RETrends.com