They grow up so fast, don't they?
On this day seven years ago a little-known website called YouTube opened on the Internet, having been created by some former workers at PayPal. The site's popularity increased at an unprecedented rate, copyright was being violated left, right, and centre, and then Google arrived to save the site from being crushed by the community it had spawned. Since then it has only continued to grow in size after repeated redesigns and divisive channel alterations. Video networks, such as Machinima and eHow, all thrive thanks to the one site, and the number of hits on Justin Bieber's song 'Baby' are an example of just how large the traffic for the site is, albeit a rather disappointing example.
Assuming this article has taken you a minute to make it this far, 72 hours of video on YouTube has been uploaded; three days worth of video is uploaded every minute. This time last year it was only half of that. Over four billion YouTube videos are watched daily. Eight hundred million worldwide users watch three billion hours worth of video per month. But a picture says a thousand words, so some moving pictures should convey a little more information. It's hard to visualize YouTube's cultural impact, unless you had a video from the team... and you do:
So from all of us here at Neowin, Happy Birthday Youtube. We love ya!
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