Milestones in years
Feb 14, 2005: YouTube, a video hosting service, was launched by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, three former PayPal employees.
April 23, 2005: Jawed Karim uploads the first video to the platform, simply entitled “Me at the zoo.”
Oct 9, 2006: Google announces the acquisition of YouTube for US$1.65 billion.
June 19, 2007: YouTube announces translated and localised sites for nine countries, including France, Spain, Italy and Poland, making the platform more accessible to global users.
May 3, 2007: launch of a programme to monetise content posted on the platform.
July 15, 2012: Psy’s “Gangnam Style” music video is posted online and becomes the first video to reach one billion views. It now has a total of over five billion views.
Feb 15, 2015: launch of YouTube Kids, an app for children with age-appropriate content and integrated parental controls.
Aug 26, 2015: launch of YouTube Gaming, a streaming platform specifically dedicated to video games. This was then integrated directly into the YouTube platform in 2019.
Sept 15, 2020: launch in India of YouTube Shorts, a short video format echoing the style of TikTok. It rolled out worldwide the following year.
Nov 14, 2022: MrBeast overtakes PewDiePie to become the world’s most-followed YouTuber with over 112 million subscribers. Today, he has over 361 million subscribers!
Fascinating statistics
2: YouTube is the second most visited website in the world, just behind … Google.
256 GB is the maximum size of a video that can be uploaded to the platform (or 12 hours, regardless of the file size).
720,000 hours of content are added to YouTube every day, equivalent to an additional 500 hours every minute.
95.9 million subscribers to BLACKPINK‘s channel, making the Korean girl group the most-followed musical act on YouTube.
100 million users subscribe to YouTube’s paid services (Premium and Music).
361 million users subscribe to MrBeast, the most popular YouTuber in the world.
2.7 billion is the number of monthly active YouTube users worldwide, ie, almost one in two internet users. India has the most users of the platform (between 450 and 500 million). In France alone, more than 40 million people watch at least one YouTube video every month.
1 billion hours of content are watched every day via the YouTube app on TV sets.
5 billion videos are watched worldwide every day on YouTube.
15 billion views for the “Baby Shark Dance” song, the most popular video of all time on the platform.