Karim said the inspiration for YouTube came from the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show controversy when Janet Jackson’s breast was briefly exposed by Justin Timberlake during the halftime show. Karim could not easily find video clips of the incident and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami online, which led to the idea of a video-sharing site. Hurley and Chen said that the original idea for YouTube was a video version of an online dating service and had been influenced by the website Hot or Not. They created posts on Craigslist asking attractive women to upload videos of themselves to YouTube in exchange for a $100 reward. Difficulty in finding enough dating videos led to a change of plans, with the site’s founders deciding to accept uploads of any video. In December 2024, YouTube added the functionality of automatic language dubbing, which uses AI to produce translations of videos into different languages.
Journalist Virginia Heffernan stated in The New York Times that such videos have “surprising implications” for the dissemination of culture and even the future of classical music. YouTube featured an April Fools prank on the site on April 1 of every year from 2008 to 2016. In 2008, all links to videos on the main page were redirected to Rick Astley’s music video “Never Gonna Give You Up”, a prank known as “rickrolling”. The next year, when clicking on a video on the main page, the whole page turned upside down, which YouTube claimed was a “new layout”.
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- On March 20, 2019, Nintendo announced on Twitter that the company will end the Creators program.
- YouTube does not view videos before they are posted online, and it is left to copyright holders to issue a DMCA takedown notice pursuant to the terms of the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act.
- The user must go through age verification via payment, scanned ID, or selfie to access all features if they are detected to be a minor.
- On YouTube, this will be based on factors such as searches and video history, and the age of the account.
- In June 2022, the War Gonzo channel run by Russian military blogger and journalist Semyon Pegov was deleted.
By 2010, the company had reached a market share of around 43% and more than 14 billion views of videos, according to comScore. That year, the company simplified its interface to increase the time users would spend on the site. The majority of YouTube’s advertising revenue goes to the publishers and video producers who hold the rights to their videos; the company retains 45% of the ad revenue. In 2010, it was reported that nearly a third of the videos with advertisements were uploaded without permission of the copyright holders.
In November 2008, YouTube reached an agreement with MGM, Lions Gate Entertainment, and CBS, allowing the companies to post full-length films and television episodes on the site, accompanied by advertisements in a section for U.S. viewers called “Shows”. The move was intended to create competition with websites such as Hulu, which features material from NBC, Fox, and Disney. In November 2009, YouTube launched a version of “Shows” available to UK viewers, offering around 4,000 full-length shows from more than 60 partners. In January 2010, YouTube introduced a film rentals service, available in many countries, and TV shows can be bought in several countries.
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That year, the company again changed its interface and at the same time, introduced a new logo with a darker shade of red. A subsequent interface change, designed to unify the experience across desktop, TV, and mobile, was rolled out in 2013. By that point, more than 100 hours were being uploaded every minute, increasing to 300 hours by November 2014.
In August 2008, a US court ruled in Lenz v. Universal Music Corp. that copyright holders cannot order the removal of an online file without first determining whether the posting reflected fair use of the material. YouTube’s owner Google announced in November 2015 that they would help cover the legal cost in select cases where they believe fair use defenses apply. In the 2011 case of Smith v. Summit Entertainment LLC, professional singer Matt Smith sued Summit Entertainment for the wrongful use of copyright takedown notices on YouTube. In April 2012, a court in Hamburg ruled that YouTube could be held responsible for copyrighted material posted by its users.
The complex has 51,468 square metres (554,000 square feet) of space and can house up to 2,800 employees. YouTube officially launched the “polymer” redesign of its user interfaces based on Material Design language as its default, as well as a redesigned logo that is built around the service’s play button emblem in August 2017. Hurley announced that he would be stepping down as chief executive officer of YouTube to take an advisory role and that Salar Kamangar would take over as head of the company in October 2010. In April 2010, Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” became the most-viewed video, becoming the first video to reach 200 million views on May 9, 2010. In 2011, more than three billion videos were being watched each day with 48 hours of new videos uploaded every minute. Most of these views came from a relatively small number of videos; according to a software engineer at that time, 30% of videos accounted for 99% of views on the site.
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On November 13, 2006, YouTube was purchased by Google for US$1.65 billion (equivalent to $2.39 billion in 2024). Google expanded YouTube’s business model from generating revenue through advertisements alone to offering paid content such as movies and exclusive content explicitly produced for YouTube. It also offers YouTube Premium, a paid subscription option for watching content without ads. YouTube incorporated the Google AdSense program, generating more revenue for both YouTube and approved content creators. In 2023, YouTube’s advertising revenue totaled $31.7 billion, a 2% increase from the $31.1 billion reported in 2022. From Q to Q3 2024, YouTube’s combined revenue from advertising and subscriptions exceeded $50 billion.
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In 2010, YouTube temporarily released a chicken road “TEXTp” mode which rendered video imagery into ASCII art letters “in order to reduce bandwidth costs by $1 per second.” In July 2023, YouTube removed the channel of British journalist Graham Phillips, active in covering the war in Donbas from 2014. In August 2023, a Moscow court fined Google 3 million rubles, around $35,000, for not deleting what it said was “fake news about the war in Ukraine”.
In 2017, viewers on average watched YouTube on mobile devices for more than an hour every day. In December 2012, two billion views were removed from the view counts of Universal and Sony music videos on YouTube, prompting a claim by The Daily Dot that the views had been deleted due to a violation of the site’s terms of service, which ban the use of automated processes to inflate view counts. That was disputed by Billboard, which said that the two billion views had been moved to Vevo, since the videos were no longer active on YouTube. As of 2018update, public access to YouTube is blocked in many countries, including China, North Korea, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Eritrea, Sudan and South Sudan. In some countries, YouTube is blocked for more limited periods of time, such as during periods of unrest, the run-up to an election, or in response to upcoming political anniversaries.
- Concurrently, old media celebrities moved into the website at the invitation of a YouTube management that witnessed early content creators accruing substantial followings and perceived audience sizes potentially larger than that attainable by television.
- The majority of YouTube’s advertising revenue goes to the publishers and video producers who hold the rights to their videos; the company retains 45% of the ad revenue.
- In August 2023, a Moscow court fined Google 3 million rubles, around $35,000, for not deleting what it said was “fake news about the war in Ukraine”.
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Whereas YouTube’s inherent ability to allow presidents to directly connect with average citizens was noted, the YouTube content creators’ new media savvy was perceived necessary to better cope with the website’s distracting content and fickle audience. YouTube, a video sharing platform, has faced various criticisms over the years, particularly regarding content moderation, offensive content, and monetization. On September 28, 2016, YouTube named Lyor Cohen, the co-founder of 300 Entertainment and former Warner Music Group executive, the Global Head of Music. In early 2018, Cohen began hinting at the possible launch of YouTube’s new subscription music streaming service, a platform that would compete with other services such as Spotify and Apple Music. On May 22, 2018, the music streaming platform named “YouTube Music” was launched for people who mostly listen to music on YouTube. In 2014, YouTube announced that it was responsible for the creation of all viral video trends, and revealed previews of upcoming trends, such as “Clocking”, “Kissing Dad”, and “Glub Glub Water Dance”.
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Should the uploader want to monetize the video again, they may remove the disputed audio in the “Video Manager”. YouTube has cited the effectiveness of Content ID as one of the reasons why the site’s rules were modified in December 2010 to allow some users to upload videos of unlimited length. In June 2007, YouTube began trials of a system for automatic detection of uploaded videos that infringe copyright. Google CEO Eric Schmidt regarded this system as necessary for resolving lawsuits such as the one from Viacom, which alleged that YouTube profited from content that it did not have the right to distribute.
On November 1, 2016, the dispute with GEMA was resolved, with Google content ID being used to allow advertisements to be added to videos with content protected by GEMA. On July 30, 2025, amid the implementation of the Online Safety Act 2023 in the United Kingdom, Google announced that it would begin to enforce “age assurance” policies for selected users in the United States as a trial. On YouTube, this will be based on factors such as searches and video history, and the age of the account. The user must go through age verification via payment, scanned ID, or selfie to access all features if they are detected to be a minor. On April 9, 2025, YouTube expressed support for the NO FAKES Act of 2025, introduced by Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) and Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and announced an expansion of its pilot program that is designed to identify content generated by AI. In May 2007, YouTube launched its Partner Program (YPP), a system based on AdSense which allows the uploader of the video to share the revenue produced by advertising on the site.
In May 2024, YouTube introduced Playables, a set of around 75 free-to-play games that can be played on the platform. According to a story that has often been repeated in the media, Hurley and Chen developed the idea for YouTube during the early months of 2005, after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen’s apartment in San Francisco. Karim did not attend the party and denied that it had occurred, but Chen remarked that the idea that YouTube was founded after a dinner party “was probably very strengthened by marketing ideas around creating a story that was very digestible”.
By early 2013, Billboard had announced that it was factoring YouTube streaming data into calculation of the Billboard Hot 100 and related genre charts. In September 2020, YouTube announced that it would be launching a beta version of a new platform of 15-second videos, similar to TikTok, called YouTube Shorts. The platform was first tested in India and later expanded to other countries, including the United States in March 2021, with videos now able to be up to 1 minute long. Like TikTok, it gives users access to built-in creative tools, including the possibility of adding licensed music to their videos. Since its purchase by Google, YouTube has expanded beyond the core website into mobile apps, network television, and the ability to link with other platforms.