Happy 6th Birthday Youtube
Why have more than a quarter of a billion people watched a video of a baby biting his brother’s finger? It’s a good question to begin exploring the weird world of YouTube, as it celebrates it’s 6th birthday.
“Charlie bit my Finger… Again” has accrued a staggering 284 million views. If you exclude official content by the likes of Justin Beiber, it’s the most watched clip of all time on the video sharing site.
Now there’s a lot of statistics to come, so first of all let’s fly back to April 23, 2005 - and the first ever video posted on Youtube. And it’s an inauspicious beginning - co-founder Jawed Karim standing in front of the elephant enclosure at the zoo, delivering the poetic line: “the cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks.”
But it was begining nonetheless. He, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen funded the start-up with bonuses from then-employer PayPal’s sale to eBay. Legend has it that the idea was born when Karim failed to find footage of Janet Jackson’s Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction online. Don’t worry, it’s all on YouTube now.
So after a legal dispute with utube.com - owned by a rather irate tubing company in Ohio - the ball was rolling and it quickly became the source of the first ‘Rickrolling incident’, one of the most common online practical jokes, whereby a bogus link will send you a video of trenchcoat-sporting 80s singer Rick Astley.
Getting back to the numbers - we’ve established that finger biting Charlie is top of the amateur charts - but top trump overall goes to Bieber’s duet with Ludacris at 472 million views. But that will no doubt be out of date by the time you read this article, such is his popularity.
We can put these crazy numbers in context by remembering that last year the site topped 2 billion views per day. And while we’re watching, we’re uploading 35 hours worth of content per minute. That’s the equivalent of 174,000 Hollywood movies a week. You can’t watch all that on your lunch break.
To handle all this content, the California-based site borrows it’s parents’ car, so to speak - making use of owner Google’s vast cloud infrastructure to process and store all the video. YouTube engineer Vijnan Shastri recently explained that they use “hundreds of thousands of machines” to vastly improve upload speeds.
This is all probably a move to appeal to quality providers; ie Hollywood. And further to that, it’s rumoured that Youtube is preparing to create celebrity designed channels, paying up to $5 million dollars for famous names to write and curate their own sites. Google have struggled to monetise the site they purchased in 2006 for $1.65 billion, and they seem to be pinning their hopes on bespoke content from the likes of Beiber and Lady Gaga. But it’s a gamble - they’d never want to exclude the amateur sensations that have made the site what it is.