YouTube celebrates its 20th anniversary this year. The first video “Me at the Zoo” aired April 23rd 2005 posted by co-founder Jawed Karim. The platform has over 2 billion users and has uploaded more than 20 trillion videos.
Julie Smith, media literacy expert and Webster University instructor, says “It was initially started on Valentine’s Day as a video-based dating site.” The site now is the “behemoth of social media platforms. 500 hours of YouTube content are uploaded every minute.”
--The most watched video is “The Baby Shark Dance”
--The first video to hit 1 billion views was Gangnam Style
--The longest video on YouTube is 571 hours long
Alphabet owns YouTube and Google.
“What it has done recently to kind of compete with TikTok is that it's created something called YouTube Shorts. So those are really fast edited clips and I think that we'll go more in that direction and not just YouTube, but I think every platform will kind of go in that direction more towards short attention span theater type stuff,” says Smith.