The same day, the company launched a public beta and by November, a Nike ad featuring Ronaldinho became the first video to reach one million total views. Video categories on YouTube include music videos, video clips, news, short and feature films, songs, documentaries, movie trailers, teasers, TV spots, live streams, vlogs, and more. From Q to Q3 2024, YouTube’s combined revenue from advertising and subscriptions exceeded $50 billion. In January 2024, YouTube had more than 2.7 billion monthly active users, who collectively watched more than one billion hours of videos every day. See what the world is watching — from the hottest music videos to what’s popular in gaming, fashion, beauty, news, learning and more. On March 20, 2019, Nintendo announced on Twitter that the company will end the Creators program.
In June 2008, a Forbes magazine article projected the 2008 revenue at $200 million, noting progress in advertising sales. According to a 2020 study, viewership of far-right videos on YouTube peaked in 2017 and “a growing body of journalistic evidence” suggested that YouTube was radicalizing young men through its recommendation engine, but that such evidence was “fraught with a bias towards sensationalism”. TED curator Chris Anderson described a phenomenon by which geographically distributed individuals in a certain field share their independently developed skills in YouTube videos, thus challenging others to improve their own skills, and spurring invention and evolution in that field. Some YouTube videos have themselves had a direct effect on world events, such as Innocence of Muslims (2012) which spurred protests and related anti-American violence internationally.
At the time of uploading a video, YouTube users are shown a message asking them not to violate copyright laws. YouTube has faced numerous challenges and criticisms in its attempts to deal with copyright, including the site’s first viral video, Lazy Sunday, which had to be taken down, due to copyright concerns. On November 11, 2021, after testing out this change in March of the same year, YouTube announced it would start hiding dislike counts on videos, making them invisible to viewers. That was disputed by Billboard, which said that the two billion views had been moved to Vevo, since the videos were no longer active on YouTube.
Since April 2016, videos continue to be monetized while the dispute is in progress, and the money goes to whoever won the dispute. The use of Content ID to remove material automatically has led to controversy in some cases, as the videos have not been checked by a human for fair use. When this occurs, the content owner has the choice of blocking the video to make it unviewable, tracking the viewing statistics of the video, or adding advertisements to the video.citation needed When a video is uploaded, it is checked against the database, and flags the video as a copyright violation if a match is found.
YouTube, a video sharing platform, has faced various criticisms over the years, particularly regarding content moderation, offensive content, and monetization. YouTube VR allows for access to all YouTube-hosted videos, but particularly supports headset access for 360° and 180°-degree video (both in 2D and stereoscopic 3D). It also allowed users to preview videos, share downloaded videos through Bluetooth, and offered more options for mobile data control and video resolution. In September 2016, YouTube Go was announced, as an Android app created for making YouTube easier to access on mobile devices in emerging markets. On February 28, 2017, in a press announcement held at YouTube Space Los Angeles, YouTube announced YouTube TV, an over-the-top MVPD-style subscription service that would be available for United States customers at a price of US$65 per month. In March 2021, Google announced plans to gradually deprecate the Google Play Movies & TV app, and eventually migrate all users to the YouTube app’s Movies & TV store to view, rent and purchase movies and TV shows (first affecting Roku, Samsung, LG, and Vizio smart TV users on July 15).
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. President Obama held a meeting at the White House with leading YouTube content creators not only to promote awareness of Obamacare but more generally to develop ways for government to better connect with the “YouTube Generation”. 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. As of 2018, public access to YouTube was blocked by countries including China, North Korea, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Eritrea, Sudan and South Sudan.
It also offers YouTube Premium, a paid subscription option for watching content without ads. 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. YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. The developer has not yet indicated which accessibility features this app supports. In January 2010, YouTube introduced a film rentals service, available in many countries, and TV shows can be bought in several countries.
YouTube had $29.2 billion ads revenue in 2022, up by $398 million from the prior year. According to Google, YouTube had made US$15.1 billion in ad revenue in 2019, in contrast to US$8.1 billion in 2017 and US$11.1 billion in 2018. Google first published exact revenue numbers for YouTube in February 2020 as part of Alphabet’s 2019 financial report. Prior to 2020, Google did not provide detailed figures for YouTube’s running costs, and YouTube’s revenues in 2007 were noted as “not material” in a regulatory filing. The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers and the YouTube Symphony Orchestra selected their membership based on individual video performances.
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. 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. Established media, news, and entertainment corporations have also created and expanded their visibility to YouTube channels to reach bigger audiences. Most content is generated by individuals, including collaborations between YouTubers and corporate sponsors. Since its purchase by Google, YouTube has expanded beyond the core website into mobile apps, network television, games, and the ability to link with other platforms. In 2023, YouTube’s advertising revenue totaled $31.7 billion, a 2% increase from the $31.1 billion reported in 2022.
On October 9, 2006, Google announced that they had acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock. The choice of the name youtube.com led to problems for a similarly named website, utube.com. Despite eventually being taken down, these duplicate uploads of the skit helped popularize YouTube’s reach and led to the upload of more third-party content. Besides helping to bolster ratings and long-term viewership for Saturday Night Live, “Lazy Sunday”‘s status as an early viral video helped establish YouTube as an important website. YouTube was not the first video-sharing site on the Internet; Vimeo was founded in November 2004, though that site remained a side project of its developers from CollegeHumor.
The system, which was initially called “Video Identification” and later became known as Content ID, creates an ID File for copyrighted audio and video material, and stores it in a database. In April 2013, it was reported that Universal Music Group and YouTube have a contractual agreement that prevents content blocked on YouTube by a request from UMG from being restored, even if the uploader of the video files a DMCA counter-notice. In April 2012, a court in Hamburg ruled that YouTube could be held responsible for copyrighted material posted by its users. 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. From 2007 to 2009 organizations including Viacom, Mediaset, and the English Premier League have filed lawsuits against YouTube, claiming that it has done too little to prevent the uploading of copyrighted material. YouTube has an estimated 14.8 billion videos with about 4% of those never having a view.
In December 2024, YouTube added the functionality of automatic language dubbing, which uses AI to produce translations of videos into different languages. In September 2022, YouTube TV began allowing customers to purchase most of its premium add-ons (excluding certain services such as NBA League Pass and AMC+) without an existing subscription to its base package. A total of 34 streaming services (including Paramount+, Showtime, Starz, MGM+, AMC+ and ViX+) were initially available for purchase. Google Play Movies & TV formally shut down on January 17, 2024, with the web version of that platform migrated to YouTube as an expansion of the Movies & TV store to desktop users.
Since its founding in 2005, the American video-sharing website YouTube has been faced with a growing number of privacy issues, including allegations that it allows users to upload unauthorized copyrighted material and allows personal information from young children to onedun be collected without their parents’ consent. The platform was tested in India and later expanded to other countries, including the United States in March 2021, with videos allowed up to 1 minute long. 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 company stated the decision was in response to experiments which confirmed that smaller YouTube creators were more likely to be targeted in dislike brigading and harassment. 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. 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. Around the same time, YouTube started using server-side ad injection, which allows the platform to inject the ads directly into the video, instead of having the ad as a separate file which can be blocked. In April 2024, YouTube announced it would be “strengthening our enforcement on third-party apps that violate YouTube’s Terms of Service, specifically ad-blocking apps”. Users of ad blockers may be given a pop-up warning saying “Video player will be blocked after 3 videos”.
It offers advertising-free streaming, access to original programming, and background and offline video playback on mobile devices. 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”. 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”. YouTube expanded the removal of Russian content from its site to include channels described as ‘pro-Russian’. Russia threatened to ban YouTube after the platform deleted two German RT channels in September 2021.