YouTube milestone, and the best video ever
Apr 23, 2010, 9:54 AM | Updated: Mar 28, 2011, 3:46 pm
Five years ago today the first video was posted on YouTube. “Me at the zoo,” was uploaded at 8:27 p.m. and it lasts for 19 seconds.
That’s one of the video sharing website’s founders Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. It’s had more than a million views in the past five years. Karim, along with Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, began working out of a garage in San Mateo to figure out an easy way to upload and share funny videos they’d taken at a dinner party. The former PayPal employees are smart men, and wealthy too. Google paid $1.65 billion worth of stock to acquire YouTube in November 2006. That’s a good investment, considering 24 Hours of video are uploaded to YouTube each minute, a milestone reached in March 2009, and it gets 1 billion views per day.
The most popular video on YouTube, Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” has been played more than 185 million times. My favorite video of all time (what’s yours?) is Charlie bit my finger – the original, although there have been many parodies and remixes of it.
The British boys’ father uploaded the video in May 2007 so their godfather could see them. Charlie bit my finger has been watched by more people than those who see American Idol, Dancing with the Stars and the Super Bowl combined. And unlike those shows, the amateur “Charlie” video didn’t cost anything to make.
Five years later, I think YouTube’s biggest contribution was the idea that anyone can be entertaining, not just the stars we see on TV and in movies. And anyone can produce interesting content, not just professionals.
