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 next year, when clicking on a video on the main page, the whole page turned upside down, which YouTube claimed was a “new layout”.
- On March 20, 2019, Nintendo announced on Twitter that the company will end the Creators program.
- 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.
- On October 15, 2024, the platform officially extended the length of shorts to 3 minutes.
- The user must go through age verification via payment, scanned ID, or selfie to access all features if they are detected to be a minor.
- In 2022, YouTube launched an experiment where the company would show users who watched longer videos on TVs a long chain of short unskippable adverts, intending to consolidate all ads into the beginning of a video.
Third-Party Advertising
YouTube incorporated the Google AdSense program, generating more revenue for both YouTube and approved content creators. In February 2015, Nintendo agreed to share the revenue with the video creators through the Nintendo Creators Program. In 2010, it was reported that nearly a third of the videos with advertisements were uploaded without permission of the copyright holders.
First released on February 15, 2015, as an Android and iOS mobile app, the app has since been released for LG, Samsung, and Sony smart TVs, as well as for Android TV. As of June 2017update, the first season of YouTube Originals had received 250 million views in total. In 2013, YouTube teamed up with satirical newspaper company The Onion to claim in an uploaded video that the video-sharing website was launched as a contest which had finally come to an end, and would shut down for ten years before being re-launched in 2023, featuring only the winning video. In 2012, clicking on the image cipher wins casino login of a DVD next to the site logo led to a video about a purported option to order every YouTube video for home delivery on DVD.
YouTube
Joining the YouTube Kids app, the company created a supervised mode, designed more for tweens, in 2021. In response to EU officials requesting that such services reduce bandwidth to make sure medical entities had sufficient bandwidth to share information, YouTube and Netflix said they would reduce streaming quality for at least thirty days as to cut bandwidth use of their services by 25% to comply with the EU's request. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when most of the world was under stay-at-home orders, usage of services like YouTube significantly increased. YouTube released a mobile app known as YouTube Kids in 2015, which was designed to provide an experience optimized for children. Through this period, YouTube tried several new ways to generate revenue beyond advertisements. YouTube officially launched the "polymer" redesign of its user interfaces based on Material Design language as its default, as well as a redesigned logo that is built around the service's play button emblem in August 2017.
App Functionality
YouTube has an estimated 14.8 billion videos with about 4% of those never having a view. On September 23, 2025, YouTube parent company Alphabet announced that it would reinstate creators that were banned for spreading misinformation about COVID-19 and the 2020 U.S. presidential election. 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.
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. In December 2024, YouTube introduced new guidelines prohibiting videos with clickbait titles to enhance content quality and combat misinformation. In 2022, YouTube launched an experiment where the company would show users who watched longer videos on TVs a long chain of short unskippable adverts, intending to consolidate all ads into the beginning of a video. After testing earlier in 2021, YouTube removed public display of dislike counts on videos in November 2021, claiming the reason for the removal was, based on its internal research, that users often used the dislike feature as a form of cyberbullying and brigading. Most of these views came from a relatively small number of videos; according to a software engineer at that time, 30% of videos accounted for 99% of views on the site. By 2010, the company had reached a market share of around 43% and more than 14 billion views of videos, according to comScore.
A YouTube spokesperson stated that while the policy itself was not new, the service had "improved the notification and appeal process to ensure better communication to our creators". In May 2007, YouTube launched its Partner Program (YPP), a system based on AdSense which allows the uploader of the video to share the revenue produced by advertising on the site. The video was retracted after it was found that the ads had been triggered by the use of copyrighted content in the video. The Guardian newspaper, as well as other major British and U.S. brands, similarly suspended their advertising on YouTube in response to their advertising appearing near offensive content. In March 2007, it struck a deal with the BBC for three channels with BBC content, one for news and two for entertainment.
YouTube Premium 혜택 알아보기
By February 2017, one billion hours of YouTube videos were being watched every day, and 400 hours worth of videos were uploaded every minute. These channel subscriptions complemented the existing Super Chat ability, launched in 2017, which allows viewers to donate between $1 and $500 to have their comment highlighted. This effort was discontinued in January 2018 and relaunched in June, with US$4.99 channel subscriptions. In April 2010, Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" became the most-viewed video, becoming the first video to reach 200 million views on May 9, 2010. In 2011, more than three billion videos were being watched each day with 48 hours of new videos uploaded every minute. Unofficial uploads of the skit to YouTube drew in more than five million collective views by February 2006 before they were removed when NBCUniversal requested it two months later based on copyright concerns.
The future of entertainment is here: see what’s next on YouTube
In 2016, YouTube introduced an option to watch every video on the platform in 360-degree mode with Snoop Dogg. The next year, YouTube added a music button to the video bar that played samples from "Sandstorm" by Darude. A video of two presenters announcing the nominated videos streamed live for 12 hours. In October 2024, a Russian court fined Google 2 undecillion rubles (equivalent to US$20 decillion) for restricting Russian state media channels on YouTube. Shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, YouTube removed all channels funded by the Russian state.
In early 2018, Cohen began hinting at the possible launch of YouTube's new subscription music streaming service, a platform that would compete with other services such as Spotify and Apple Music. YouTube Premium was originally announced on November 12, 2014, as "Music Key", a subscription music streaming service, and was intended to integrate with and replace the existing Google Play Music "All Access" service. While some users praised the move as a way to discourage trolls, others felt that hiding dislikes would make it harder for viewers to recognize clickbait or unhelpful videos and that other features already existed for creators to limit bullying.
- Russia threatened to ban YouTube after the platform deleted two German RT channels in September 2021.
- Videos of the 2.5% of artists categorized as “mega”, “mainstream” and “mid-sized” received 90.3% of the relevant views on YouTube and Vevo in that year.
- In the United States as of November 2020, and June 2021 worldwide, YouTube reserves the right to monetize any video on the platform, even if their uploader is not a member of the YouTube Partner Program.
- The platform was first tested in India and later expanded to other countries, including the United States in March 2021, with videos now able to be up to 1 minute long.
- YouTube released a mobile app known as YouTube Kids in 2015, which was designed to provide an experience optimized for children.
YouTube does not view videos before they are posted online, and it is left to copyright holders to issue a DMCA takedown notice pursuant to the terms of the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act. 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.
YouTube Play Buttons, a part of the YouTube Creator Rewards, are a recognition by YouTube of its most popular channels. In April 2017, YouTube set an eligibility requirement of 10,000 lifetime views for a paid subscription. Usually, no more than half of the eligible videos have a pre-roll advertisement, due to a lack of interested advertisers. According to TubeMogul, in 2013 a pre-roll advertisement on YouTube (one that is shown before the video starts) cost advertisers on average $7.60 per 1000 views.
Get the official YouTube app on iPhones and iPads. Download the YouTube app for a richer viewing experience on your smartphone.
In cases where the entire site is banned due to one particular video, YouTube will often agree to remove or limit access to that video in order to restore service. 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.
