20 YEARS OF YouTube

We look back at the impact of the world's most popular video-sharing website

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Online megastars: the YouTubers who your kids love A YouTube video saved my life. Now I'm a martial arts champion

Whether it’s watching a how-to tutorial on something, tuning into your favourite video blogger (vlogger) or catching a clip that has gone viral, viewing videos on YouTube has become part of most of our everyday lives.

This month marks the 20th birthday of the video-sharing site. It was February 2005 when YouTube was launched. Twenty years on, it is now the second most-visited website in the world after Google search with more than 2.7 billion monthly users, who collectively watch more than one billion hours of videos a day.

Over the years, it’s helped the likes of singers Justin Bieber and Ed Sheeran rocket to huge professional success, and led to the emergence of ‘going viral’, a term which a couple of decades ago we associated solely with our health!

Now when we hear the phrase, thanks to YouTube, the first thing we think of is the internet. Woman’s Own takes a look back at a few well-known videos that took the world wide web by storm.

Singing sensations