YouTube

YouTube is a social media platform and video-sharing website registered on 14 February 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim — three former PayPal employees — and headquartered in San Bruno, California¹. It began as an experiment among three former colleagues and grew into the world's largest video-sharing service¹.

Users can like or dislike videos, comment and respond to other comments in threads, share videos and channels, subscribe to creators, and organise content into playlists¹. The platform supports several formats: conventional long-form videos, short vertical clips published as YouTube Shorts, and live feeds with real-time audience interaction¹. Creators manage their channels through YouTube Studio, which provides tools for uploading videos, editing titles and thumbnails, reviewing audience statistics, moderating comments, and controlling whether content is public, private or unlisted¹.

YouTube describes its mission simply: to give everyone a voice and show them the world². The service is available through its website and through apps for mobile devices, tablets, smart televisions, streaming devices and video game consoles¹. Alongside the main platform it operates specialised services, including YouTube TV, a standalone subscription-based streaming service available in the United States; YouTube Kids, providing content exclusively intended for younger viewers; YouTube Premium, which removes advertisements and allows background and offline playback; and YouTube Music for songs, albums and music videos¹.

YouTube initially operated out of Hurley's garage in California as a video-based dating website, with its logo and trademark fittingly registered on Valentine's Day 2005¹. It struggled to attract users, and the founders changed the direction of the fledgling platform about two months later¹.

The pivot found its symbol on 23 April 2005, when Jawed Karim uploaded an experimental video as part of a test run for the platform's new functions¹. The clip, 19 seconds long, showed Karim in front of an elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo and was titled “Me at the zoo”; it became the first video ever uploaded to YouTube¹. The video remains on the platform today, published by the channel “jawed”³.

Shortly after the site opened on a limited “beta” basis in May 2005, it was attracting some 30,000 visitors per day¹. By the time YouTube officially launched on 15 December 2005, it was serving more than 2 million video views each day¹. By January 2006 the number had increased to more than 25 million views a day¹.

Growth kept compounding through 2006¹. More than 25 million videos were available on the site by March 2006, with over 20,000 new videos uploaded daily¹. By the summer of 2006 YouTube was serving more than 100 million videos per day, and the pace of uploads showed no sign of slowing¹.

YouTube's quick growth made the platform increasingly expensive to operate¹. The company needed additional computer equipment, broadband capacity and funds to address possible copyright lawsuits, yet it had achieved only limited success in generating revenue¹. Meanwhile Google's own video-sharing service had failed to attract substantial traffic — prompting Google to acquire YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock in November 2006, its largest acquisition at that time¹.

The deal was announced on 9 October 2006: Google said it had agreed to acquire YouTube for $1.65 billion in a stock-for-stock transaction⁴. Google described the acquisition as combining one of the largest and fastest-growing online video entertainment communities with its own expertise in organising information and creating new advertising models⁴. After the acquisition, the company said, YouTube would operate independently to preserve its successful brand and passionate community⁴.

Google closed the acquisition on 13 November 2006⁵. In connection with the deal Google issued an aggregate of 3,217,560 Class A shares, plus restricted stock units, options and a warrant exercisable for or convertible into a further 442,210 shares⁵. A 12.5% slice of the equity was held in escrow for one year⁵.

Rather than merging the two websites, Google continued YouTube's operation as before¹. To reduce the risk of copyright-infringement lawsuits, it negotiated deals with entertainment companies that allowed copyrighted material to appear on the platform and gave users the right to include certain copyrighted songs in their videos, and it agreed to remove tens of thousands of copyrighted files¹. In November 2008 Google reached an agreement with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to show some of the studio's full-length movies and television shows free to watch, with advertisements running alongside¹.

The dated figures below trace the platform's course from its first experimental upload to its 2025 revenues, each keeping the date given in its source¹.

In 2007 YouTube introduced advertisements on the platform, followed by the YouTube Partner Program, which allowed content creators to earn a share of advertisement revenue for each ad shown with their videos¹. Creators earn 55% of the revenue generated from each advertisement aired on their channel¹. The platform also recognises major subscriber milestones with Creator Awards: a play button design in silver for 100,000 subscribers and gold for 1 million, with Diamond and Red Diamond awards for 10 million and 100 million respectively¹.

The Partner Program gives creators greater access to YouTube resources and monetisation features, including Creator Support teams, as well as revenue sharing from ads served on their content¹¹. To become eligible, a channel needs 1,000 subscribers with 4,000 qualified watch hours in the last 12 months, or 1,000 subscribers with 10 million qualified Shorts views in the last 90 days¹¹. One nuance matters for short-form creators: qualified watch hours from Shorts views in the Shorts Feed do not count towards the 4,000 qualified public watch hours threshold¹¹.

Once accepted, creators can monetise through modules such as Watch Page Ads, Shorts Feed Ads, Memberships and Supers¹¹. Activity is expected: YouTube may turn off monetisation on channels that have not uploaded a video or posted to the Posts tab for six months or more¹¹.

The creator economy built on the platform is now measured in the tens of billions. Over the four years to January 2026, YouTube paid more than $100 billion to creators, artists and media companies⁷. In 2024 YouTube's ecosystem contributed $55 billion to U.S. GDP and supported more than 490,000 full-time jobs⁷.

YouTube's copyright system rests on three tools in its Copyright Management Suite¹². A webform, available in more than 80 languages, gives all rightsholders a streamlined way to submit copyright removal requests; the Copyright Match Tool automatically finds videos that are the same as, or very similar to, ones previously uploaded; and Content ID serves rightsholders with the most complex rights-management needs, such as movie studios and music labels¹².

Content ID is YouTube's automated content identification system, which copyright owners use to identify and manage their copyright-protected content on the platform¹³. It identifies matches using a database of audio and visual files submitted by copyright owners, and every video uploaded to YouTube is automatically scanned by the system¹³. Depending on the copyright owner's settings, a match can block a video from being viewed, monetise it by running ads — sometimes sharing revenue with the uploader — or track the video's viewership statistics¹³.

The volume of automated enforcement is vast. Of the more than 2 billion Content ID claims made in 2024, fewer than 1% were disputed — and over 70% of those disputes succeeded, because claimants either voluntarily released the claim or did not respond within the 30-day window¹². The majority of copyright claims and removal requests on YouTube come from the platform's automatic detection technology¹².

The rules for handling matches are set in advance through rightsholders' own Content ID settings, so the same detection machinery can be tuned to block, monetise or merely track¹³. The commercial layer around it has been built partly through deal-making: after the acquisition, Google negotiated agreements with entertainment companies, and in November 2008 it reached a deal with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to show full-length movies and television shows free to watch, with advertisements alongside¹.

YouTube's recommendation system is built on a simple principle: helping people find the videos they want to watch and that will give them value². At the highest level, it is designed to anticipate and meet a user's needs through relevant and satisfying viewing experiences¹⁴. The stakes are considerable, because recommendations drive a significant amount of the overall viewership on YouTube — even more than channel subscriptions or search².

The system has travelled a long way from 2008, when the homepage ranked videos by popularity to create one big “Trending” page and most viewership came from searches or shared links off the platform². Today it sorts through billions of videos to recommend content tailored to each viewer's specific interests². In its 2021 explanation of the system, YouTube describes it as learning every day from over 80 billion pieces of information — signals such as clicks, watchtime, survey responses, sharing, likes and dislikes².

Two findings reshaped how the system measures success. YouTube learned back in 2011 that clicking on a video did not mean the viewer actually watched it, and it added watchtime to its recommendations in 2012². When watchtime was first incorporated, the company saw an immediate 20% drop in views — a trade-off it accepted because delivering more value to viewers mattered more². To keep quality high, YouTube measures “valued watchtime” through user surveys: only videos rated four or five stars count².

Under the hood, the system is a deep-learning pipeline: the RecSys '16 paper by Google researchers describes a two-stage architecture of a deep candidate generation model followed by a separate deep ranking model¹⁵. YouTube stresses that recommendations do not run through a social network; instead, their success depends on accurately predicting the videos a viewer wants to watch². Logged-in viewers see a mixture of personalised recommendations, subscriptions and the latest news and information on their homepage¹⁴, and users can pause, edit or delete their search and watch history at any time¹⁴.

Empirical work on the question offers a more nuanced picture¹⁶. A study of more than 300,000 Americans, tracking their browsing behaviour on and off YouTube from January 2016 through December 2019, described the platform as arguably the largest and most engaging online media consumption platform in the world and noted that its scale had fueled concerns about radicalisation via biased recommendations¹⁶. Using a labeled set of political news channels, the study found that news consumption on YouTube is dominated by mainstream and largely centrist sources¹⁶. Consumers of far-right content, while more engaged than average, represent a small and stable percentage of YouTube news consumers¹⁶.

Cultural milestones on YouTube have doubled as milestones for online video as a whole¹. In December 2012, “Gangnam Style” by South Korean musician PSY became the first YouTube video to reach one billion views¹. As of 2026, Pinkfong's “Baby Shark Dance” was the platform's most-viewed video, and the creator MrBeast's channel was its most subscribed, with more than 500 million subscribers¹.

For a growing share of Americans, YouTube is also a news source. The share of Americans who get news on YouTube rose from 23% in 2020 to 32% in 2024¹⁰.

For many users, it is also a classroom. In a 2018 Pew Research Center survey, roughly half of YouTube users said the platform was very important for helping them figure out how to do things they had never done before — equal to 35% of all U.S. adults¹⁷. Later surveys underlined the pattern: in 2025, 93% of U.S. viewers aged 18–27 agreed that YouTube helps them learn new skills, according to a Kantar survey, while 79% of U.S. teachers who use YouTube agreed that it helps students learn, according to an Oxford Economics survey⁷.

Television has become a core surface for the platform. As of January 2026, YouTube had been No. 1 in streaming watchtime in the U.S. for nearly three years, according to Nielsen⁷. By 2026, viewers were watching more than one billion hours of YouTube content on television screens each day¹.

The audience is extraordinarily broad. As of 2024, 85% of U.S. adults said they ever use YouTube — more than the share who use Facebook (70%), Instagram (50%) or other social media sites and apps¹⁰. It is the most widely used of all the online platforms Pew Research Center has asked about in the United States¹⁰, and nine-in-ten U.S. teens aged 13 to 17 use it, most of them daily (73%)¹⁰.

YouTube advertising revenue was $40.4 billion in 2025, up from $36.1 billion in 2024⁸. The $4.2 billion increase was driven by direct-response advertising followed by brand advertising, both of which benefited from increased spending by advertisers⁸. Across ads and subscriptions together, revenue exceeded $60 billion for the full year 2025⁹, and in its fourth-quarter and full-year 2025 results Alphabet reported more than 325 million paid subscriptions across its consumer services, led by Google One and YouTube Premium⁹. The company's annual report describes YouTube as providing people with entertainment, information and opportunities to learn something new, and as helping support the creator economy through the Partner Program⁸.

Shorts, the platform's short-form format, has deep roots: as the company notes, user-generated short videos were born on YouTube starting with its first upload¹⁸. By January 2026 the format averaged 200 billion daily views⁷. Subscriptions are growing alongside it: Alphabet attributed growth in paid subscriptions primarily to YouTube services and Google One⁸.

The platform's scale keeps compounding. By 2025, more than 20 billion videos had been uploaded to YouTube, with more than 20 million new uploads each day, and about three million channels had joined its Partner Program¹. By 2026 the service had localised versions in more than 100 countries and supported 80 languages¹.

Artificial intelligence is now part of the machinery. On average, more than a million channels used YouTube's AI creation tools daily in December⁷, and in December alone more than 20 million users learned more about the content they watched through the company's Ask tool⁷. YouTube says it is building on the foundation of Content ID — a system its partners have trusted for well over a decade — to equip creators with new tools to manage the use of their likeness in AI-generated content⁷.

The sequence below follows the platform's turning points, each dated as its source dates it¹.