43 Fun Facts About YouTube

YouTube's three founders had all been early employees of which company?

PayPal employed Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim before YouTube; by the usual telling, the idea for the site was hatched at a dinner party in San Francisco.

Per Jawed Karim, YouTube's idea partly came from being unable to find clips of which 2004 event?

Janet Jackson's halftime show and that year's Asian tsunami were both hard to find on video, Karim has said; his co-founders instead trace the idea to a San Francisco dinner party.

The first video ever uploaded to YouTube, on 23 April 2005, was titled what?

Me at the zoo is a brief clip of co-founder Jawed Karim standing in front of the elephants at San Diego Zoo and remarking on how long their trunks are.

On April Fools' Day 2008, the featured videos on YouTube's homepage all led to which singer's music video?

Rick Astley's 'Never Gonna Give You Up' was waiting behind every featured link, as YouTube turned the rickroll, the web's favourite bait-and-switch prank, on its own users.

How much did Google pay to acquire YouTube in November 2006?

$1.65bn in Google stock bought a company less than two years old whose early headquarters was an office above a pizzeria in San Mateo, California.

What slogan did YouTube adopt in its early years?

Broadcast Yourself replaced 'Tune In, Hook Up', the tagline from the site's earliest days, when the founders still imagined it as a video dating service.

As of 2019, roughly how much new video was being uploaded to YouTube every minute?

500 hours a minute was YouTube's own figure in May 2019, which works out to about 82 years of new video arriving every single day.

Which YouTube scheme, launched in 2007, first gave creators a share of ad money?

The Partner Program began in May 2007 with only the site's most popular creators chosen to share ad revenue, and was later opened to any channel that meets its thresholds.

Which former Google executive, in whose garage Google was founded, was YouTube's CEO from 2014 to 2023?

Susan Wojcicki rented her Menlo Park garage to Larry Page and Sergey Brin in 1998, joined Google as an early employee, and in 2006 urged the company to buy YouTube.

Who was named YouTube's CEO in February 2023?

Neal Mohan was so valued as an advertising executive that Google reportedly paid him $100 million in 2011 to stop him leaving for Twitter; he later ran YouTube's products.

Which video became the first on YouTube to reach a billion views, on 21 December 2012?

Gangnam Style reached a billion views five months after its release, and by December 2014 Psy's video had outgrown YouTube's 32-bit view counter, forcing an upgrade to 64-bit.

Which video became YouTube's most-viewed of all time in November 2020?

Baby Shark Dance, Pinkfong's take on an old children's chant, took off in 2017 when a dance challenge spread from Indonesian television, and in 2022 became the first video to pass 10 billion views.

Which music video was the first on YouTube to reach six billion views, in February 2019?

Despacito hit six billion views in February 2019; two summers earlier Malaysia had barred the song from its state radio and television stations over its lyrics.

'Charlie bit my finger', the 2007 viral clip of two English brothers, was sold in 2021 as what?

An NFT of the clip fetched $760,999 in May 2021; the family had said the original would then vanish from YouTube, but the buyer asked for it to stay up.

Which YouTuber hosted a 2024 Prime Video game show in which 1,000 contestants competed for $5 million?

MrBeast, real name Jimmy Donaldson, hosted Beast Games, and by the finale the advertised $5 million prize had been doubled to $10 million.

Which music label became the first channel to reach 100 million subscribers, in May 2019?

T-Series began with Gulshan Kumar, from a family of Delhi fruit-juice sellers, selling cheap music cassettes; its channel passed 100 million subscribers after a meme-fuelled race with PewDiePie.

Which YouTube comedy series, begun in 2009, became a Cartoon Network show in 2012?

The Annoying Orange made the jump to Cartoon Network within three years, and in 2013 a North Dakota ad agency sued, claiming the character copied a talking orange from its own campaign.

What is the real name of PewDiePie, the first individual YouTuber to pass 100 million subscribers?

Felix Kjellberg quit an engineering degree at Chalmers in 2011 and, with no help from his parents, paid for his early videos by working at a hot-dog stand.

What was PewDiePie's October 2018 diss track aimed at the music label overtaking him called?

Bitch Lasagna mocked the label throughout the subscriber race, and in April 2019 the Delhi High Court ordered YouTube to block it and its follow-up at the label's request.

YouTube Rewind 2018 overtook which music video as the most-disliked video on the site?

Justin Bieber's 'Baby' had held the unwanted record for years before Rewind 2018 took it within a week of release; YouTube skipped Rewind in 2020 and scrapped the series for good in 2021.

In November 2021, YouTube announced it would hide what from viewers?

Dislike counts vanished from public view in November 2021 because, YouTube said, coordinated 'dislike bombing' was being used to harass creators, who kept private access to the totals.

A YouTube channel receives the Gold Creator Award, or Gold Play Button, on reaching how many subscribers?

The Gold Creator Award marks 1,000,000 subscribers, but it is not automatic: YouTube reviews each channel first and can withhold the plaque from any that has broken its rules.

Which energy-drink brand's 2012 skydive from the edge of space drew a then-record eight million live YouTube viewers?

Red Bull bankrolled skydiver Baumgartner's Stratos jump over New Mexico, in which he broke the sound barrier in freefall while more than eight million people watched live.

YouTube Shorts launched as a beta in September 2020 in which country, soon after it banned TikTok?

India had banned TikTok and 58 other Chinese apps in June 2020 after a military clash on its Chinese border, and YouTube brought its Shorts beta there within three months.

In October 2024, YouTube raised the maximum length of a Short to what?

3 minutes became the limit on 15 October 2024, triple the old 60 seconds, after YouTube said longer Shorts were among the features creators requested most.

Which name did YouTube Premium carry from 2015 to 2018?

YouTube Red grew out of a music-only beta called Music Key, widening ad-free viewing to every video in 2015, and took the Premium name in 2018 when YouTube Music became a separate service.

Since 2020, YouTube has switched off which feature on videos marked as made for kids?

Comments are disabled on made-for-kids videos, as are personalised ads, a change that followed Google's $170 million settlement in 2019 over YouTube collecting data from under-13s.

The 2017 advertiser exodus over ads beside extremist content became known by which nickname?

The Adpocalypse was a name PewDiePie helped popularise as creators' ad income collapsed; YouTube answered by barring channels with under 10,000 lifetime views from earning ad money.

Which comedy duo of Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla had YouTube's most-subscribed channel three times?

Smosh broke through lip-syncing the Pokémon theme, briefly the most-viewed video on the site and later pulled over a copyright claim, and went on to top the subscriber table three separate times.

In 2023, Hecox and Padilla bought back their channel from which company, owned by fellow YouTubers Rhett and Link?

Mythical had rescued the channel in 2019 after its previous owner, Defy Media, abruptly shut down; the two founders bought a majority back in June 2023.

Which toy-unboxing channel made its child star Forbes's highest-paid YouTuber for three years running from 2018?

Ryan's World began in 2015 when Ryan Kaji, aged three and a fan of toy-review channels, started making his own; by 2018 Forbes put his earnings at $22 million for the year.

Which media company, then owner of MTV and Comedy Central, sued YouTube for $1 billion in 2007?

Viacom accused YouTube of profiting from pirated clips of its shows, but the courts held that copyright law's safe harbour protected the site, and the two sides settled in 2014.

How long is the first video ever uploaded to YouTube?

The first upload runs just 19 seconds, yet co-founder Jawed Karim has several times rewritten its description to protest changes YouTube made to the site.

Which news network co-hosted the 2007 presidential debates that took questions via YouTube videos?

CNN chose the questions from videos sent in by YouTube users, among them a talking snowman who asked the Democrats what they would do about global warming for his son's sake.

YouTube was founded on which holiday in 2005?

Valentine's Day 2005 was when the youtube.com domain went live, a fitting date given that the founders first pictured the site as a video dating service.

YouTube Gaming, launched in 2015, was built to compete with which live-streaming service?

Twitch was the company YouTube had itself reportedly agreed to buy for about $1 billion in 2014, before Amazon closed the deal instead a few months later.

In which California city has YouTube been headquartered since moving there in October 2006?

YouTube moved to 901 Cherry Avenue in San Bruno in October 2006, weeks before Google completed its takeover, and later expanded across neighbouring office parks in the city.

Which comedy trio's 2005 SNL sketch 'Lazy Sunday' became one of YouTube's first viral hits?

The Lonely Island (Andy Samberg, Akiva Schaffer and Jorma Taccone) made 'Lazy Sunday' for SNL in December 2005; unofficial uploads drew over five million views before NBC demanded they be taken down.

Until 2015, a new video's view count would famously freeze at which number while being verified?

301 was where a count froze while YouTube checked that a video's early views came from real people and not from fraud, a quirk it finally removed in August 2015.

A Nike ad starring which footballer was the first YouTube video to reach one million views?

Nike's 'Touch of Gold' clip of Ronaldinho juggling a ball against the crossbar became the first YouTube video to pass one million views, in November 2005.

Hurley and Chen said YouTube's original concept was a video dating site influenced by which website?

Hot or Not was the model, and the founders even advertised on Craigslist for women to upload dating videos, but nobody came forward, so they opened the site to any video.

Until 2010, YouTube viewers rated videos using which system, later replaced by thumbs up and thumbs down?

One to five stars was the scale until March 2010, when YouTube dropped it after finding that viewers almost always gave five, which left the ratings telling nobody anything.

Which company sued YouTube in 2006 because misdirected visitors kept crashing its own website?

Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment owned utube.com, which buckled under 68 million hits in a single month, so it asked a court to shut YouTube down or make it pay for a new address.