By February 2017, one billion hours of YouTube videos were being watched every day, and 400 hours worth of videos were uploaded every minute. 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. 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.
- The next year, YouTube added a music button to the video bar that played samples from “Sandstorm” by Darude.
- YouTube Movies & TV is a video on demand (VOD) service that offers movies and television shows for purchase or rental, depending on availability, along with a selection of movies (encompassing between 100 and 500 titles overall) that are free to stream, with interspersed ad breaks.
- Users of ad blockers may be given a pop-up warning saying “Video player will be blocked after 3 videos”.
- 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.
In June 2022, the War Gonzo channel run by Russian military blogger and journalist Semyon Pegov was deleted. In 2021, two accounts linked to RT DE, the German channel of the Russian state-owned RT network, were removed for breaching YouTube’s policies relating to COVID-19. Should the uploader want to monetize the video again, they may remove the disputed audio in the “Video Manager”.
Revenue to copyright holders
In December 2012, two billion views were removed from the view counts of Universal and Sony music videos on YouTube, prompting a claim by The Daily Dot that the views had been deleted due to a violation of the site’s terms of service, which ban the use of automated processes to inflate view counts. The platform aims to penalize creators using misleading or sensationalized titles, with potential actions including video removal or channel suspension. In 2014, YouTube announced a subscription service known as “Music Key”, which bundled ad-free streaming of music content on YouTube with the existing Google Play Music service. In 2013, YouTube launched a pilot program for content providers to offer premium, subscription-based channels. As of May 2019update, videos were being uploaded to the platform at a rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute, and as of mid-2024update, there were approximately 14.8 billion videos in total.
YouTube Go
On May 25, 2023, YouTube announced that they would be shutting down this feature on June 26, 2023. On October 15, 2024 the platform officially extended the length of shorts to 3 minutes. In May 2022, Google announced that they would be shutting down YouTube Go in August 2022.
YouTube Premium (formerly Music Key and YouTube Red) is YouTube’s premium subscription service. 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.
Learn what it takes to succeed as a podcaster on the platform.
- Starting with the Oculus Quest, the app was updated for compatibility with mixed-reality passthrough modes on VR headsets.
- Usually, no more than half of the eligible videos have a pre-roll advertisement, due to a lack of interested advertisers.
- YouTube expanded the removal of Russian content from its site to include channels described as ‘pro-Russian’.
- 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”.
- YouTube Premium (formerly Music Key and YouTube Red) is YouTube’s premium subscription service.
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In November 2009, YouTube launched a version of “Shows” available to UK viewers, offering around 4,000 full-length shows from more than 60 partners. 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.
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 site exited beta in December 2005, by which time the site was receiving 8 million views a day. Karim could not easily find video clips of the incident and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami online, which led to the idea of a video-sharing site.
YouTube Premium
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, 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. It also offers YouTube Premium, a paid subscription option for watching content without ads.
YouTube Movies & TV
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. Under YouTube’s changes to its recommendation engine, the most-recommended channel evolved from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (2016) to Fox News (2019). Senate introduced a resolution condemning Joseph Kony 16 days after the “Kony 2012” video was posted to YouTube, with resolution co-sponsor Senator Lindsey Graham remarking that the video “will do more to lead to (Kony’s) demise than all other action combined.”
Google Chrome
Through this period, YouTube tried several new ways to generate revenue beyond advertisements. The lawsuit was filed due to alleged copyright infringement of Viacom’s material by YouTube. Hurley announced that he would be stepping down as chief executive officer of YouTube to take an advisory role and that Salar Kamangar would take over as head of the company in October 2010. That year, the company simplified its interface to increase the time users would spend on the site. 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 vegas casino to problems for a similarly named website, utube.com.
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. 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.
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. YouTube began offering free-to-view movie titles to its users in November 2018; selections of new movies are added and others removed, unannounced each month. YouTube Movies & TV is a video on demand (VOD) service that offers movies and television shows for purchase or rental, depending on availability, along with a selection of movies (encompassing between 100 and 500 titles overall) that are free to stream, with interspersed ad breaks. As of September 2019, the app is available in 69 countries, including Hong Kong and Macau, and one province. YouTube Kids is an American children’s video app developed by YouTube, a subsidiary of Google.
In March 2017, the government of the United Kingdom pulled its advertising campaigns from YouTube, after reports that its ads had appeared on videos containing extremist content. Access to specific videos is sometimes prevented due to copyright and intellectual property protection laws (e.g. in Germany), violations of hate speech, and preventing access to videos judged inappropriate for youth, which is also done by YouTube with the YouTube Kids app and with “restricted mode”. On November 1, 2022, YouTube launched Primetime Channels, a channel store platform offering third-party subscription streaming add-ons sold a la carte through the YouTube website and app, competing with similar subscription add-on stores operated by Apple, Prime Video and Roku. By 2019, creators were having videos taken down or demonetized when Content ID identified even short segments of copyrighted music within a much longer video, with different levels of enforcement depending on the record label.
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. It was distinct from the company’s main Android app and allowed videos to be downloaded and shared with other users. 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. 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.
App Functionality
On February 16, 2023, Wojcicki announced that she would step down as CEO, with Neal Mohan named as her successor. In 2020, Roku removed the YouTube TV app from its streaming store after the two companies were unable to reach an agreement. 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.
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 2018update, public access to YouTube is blocked in many countries, including China, North Korea, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Eritrea, Sudan and South Sudan. In December 2024, YouTube added the functionality of automatic language dubbing, which uses AI to produce translations of videos into different languages. In February 2017, YouTube Go was launched in India, and expanded in November 2017 to 14 other countries, including Nigeria, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Kenya, and South Africa. 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.
YouTube has enabled people to more directly engage with government, such as in the CNN/YouTube presidential debates (2007) in which ordinary people submitted questions to U.S. presidential candidates via YouTube video, with a techPresident co-founder saying that Internet video was changing the political landscape. The study also concluded that YouTube was becoming an important platform by which people acquire news. A Pew Research Center study reported the development of “visual journalism”, in which citizen eyewitnesses and established news organizations share in content creation. By early 2013, Billboard had announced that it was factoring YouTube streaming data into calculation of the Billboard Hot 100 and related genre charts. 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.
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.
The next year, the site celebrated its “100th anniversary” with a range of sepia-toned silent, early 1900s-style films, including a parody of Keyboard Cat. In 2010, YouTube temporarily released a “TEXTp” mode which rendered video imagery into ASCII art letters “in order to reduce bandwidth costs by $1 per second.” 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”. Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov labeled the court decision as “symbolic” and warned Google that it “should not be restricting the actions of our broadcasters on its platform.” In July 2023, YouTube removed the channel of British journalist Graham Phillips, active in covering the war in Donbas from 2014.
