The video sharing website YouTube for the past 10 years has been home to a wide variety of videos ranging from education to entertainment to funny animal videos. But the iconic site had its first video uploaded on 23 April 2005, with a guy standing in the zoo, and the guy in question being Jawed Karim, co founder YouTube standing in front of some elephants, the grainy, 19-second video now has over 17 million views.
We’ve come a long way from that and a lot of content is now being uploaded with every passing minute. People have been hooked to the site for their daily dose of videos be it latest news about the celebrity that you want to catch or the late night match highlights you’ve missed. You’ll find everything on YouTube.
YouTube has been a career option for a lot of superstars ranging from game critic PewDiePie, prankster Adrian Van Oyen, IISuperwomanII aka Lily Singh and the most famous South Korean singing sensation Psy are just a few among the many who have attained celeb status due to the free video streaming website.
Back home, channels like All India Bakchod and The Viral Fever (TVF) have become YouTube phenomenons due to the website’s reach among the youth.
Recently, Gangam Style broke YouTube’s counter which had to be re-programmed to record more numbers on its views counter. YouTube said that the video – it’s most watched ever – had been viewed more than 2,147,483,647 times.
It had to change the maximum view limit to 9,223,372,036,854,775,808, or more than nine quintillion.
Google, that bought the site for $1.65 billion in 2006, will celebrate the site’s 10th anniversary in May when YouTube first opened its doors to the public in beta.