Insider Marketing Tips

YouTube is a free online video sharing website where any visitor can upload, watch, and share video clips. The site has several ways to show the popularity and quality of the videos such as a 1-5 star rating system, the ability to leave comments, and a running count of how many times each video has been viewed.

Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim founded YouTube, Inc. on February 14, 2005. The founders were former employees of PayPal, another huge success. The domain name “YouTube.com” was activated on February 15, 2005, with the website launching shortly thereafter.

If you are interested to see what the founders look like, you can see a video message from Chad and Steve the founders at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCVxQ_3Ejkg. It is interesting to note the relaxed and informal atmosphere of this video, and it tells you a lot about what the vision of YouTube is.

In fact, YouTube’s informality and confidence which has led to wonderful success. Informal, almost amateur videos of people clowning around ad-lib (like the founders in the video) are part of the major driving force behind YouTube.

In November 2005, just 10 months after its founding, YouTube received funding from Sequoia Capital and the service was officially launched in December 2005. In the time since, YouTube has had a sensational and meteoric rise to very top the entire internet, and is currently (as of writing this) in the top 5 most visited sites online.

YouTube Information:

• YouTube went from zero to over 4 million monthly visitors to their site within 3 months and is still growing by leaps and bounds.
• The startup company was acquired by Google in October 2006 for $1.65 Billion! (Only 20 months after the company was started!), thus combining the biggest force in search and internet advertising with the biggest force in online video.
• YouTube has changed the entire landscape of TV advertising, and rivals network television in viewing.
• In 2006, YouTube won TIME magazine’s “Invention of the Year”.
• Online video is projected to be the biggest online trend of 2007: YouTube has a lot more growth left in it yet!
• YouTube is in the top 5 biggest web properties in the world.
• YouTube features videos made by thousands of internet users, and has already made many people famous.
• More than 65,000 new videos are uploaded everyday
• Major media outlets are monitoring popular videos and stories on YouTube, and are using videos they find there to create stories featured in the largest papers in the world.
• YouTube serves up over 200 million clips daily.
• YouTube streams all sorts of video content including movies, t.v. shows, music videos, commercials and probably most importantly, a huge amount of amateur content contributed by an enthusiastic and thriving community.
• The major advantage of YouTube’s technology over the other various forms of internet video is the video playback technology which is based on Macromedia’s FlashPlayer 7 which is present on over 85% of computers connected to the internet.
• It’s rapid growth has far exceeded the growth of major websites as evidenced by the chart below. Craigslist, MySpace, eBay, Blogger.com

Wow! Just to give you an idea of immense popular this site has become in such a short period of time, take a look at the graph below which shows 5 other heavyweight internet companies: eBay, MySpace, Blogger.com and Craigslist.