How Youtube Changed The World!

Whether it's music videos, lectures, silly stunts, or just funny cats, this online phenomenon is increasingly ruling our lives

- Simon Hemelryk

An unassuming young man stands in front of some elephants at the San Diego zoo. “Um, the whole thing about these guys is they have really, really, really long trunks,” he rambles self-consciously into the camera. “And that’s pretty much all there is to say.” It’s hard to believe that when this banal clip was uploaded to a new website called YouTube on 23 April 2005, it would launch a world-changing phenomenon. The young man was YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, a native of East Germany, who, along with co-founders Steve Chen, originally from Taipei, and Chad Hurley from the US, saw a hole in the internet for a service that allowed people to share personal videos easily. It caught on spectacularly and within a year was showing 25 million videos a day. Eleven years on, more than a billion users visit the site every month, watching six billion hours of video, with 100 hours of film uploaded to the site every minute. In India alone, YouTube gets more than 60 million unique users a month and watch time has been growing at 80 percent, year on year.

The billions of videos now on the site, uploaded by everyone from homemakers to multinational corporations, range from cute cats to speeches from world leaders—and almost everything in between. And, from its mumbling beginnings, YouTube has fundamentally changed much of how we work, rest and play.