Although I only discovered YouTube
in December 2006, it was founded in February 2005. In about a year and a half,
YouTube has been so successful Google sealed the deal to buy it in November
2006 for $1.65-billion! Not bad for a site that was launched with a video of a
co-founder’s cat playing with a dangling string!
Now, “Users upload 6500 new videos
to the site every day,” according to a January 2007 Time magazine article. Many
of the videos are taken with home camcorders and cell phones. In fact, videos
that showed L.A. police repeatedly punching a suspect on the ground, a college
student being tasered, and an outraged comedian yelling disparaging ethnic
descriptions, were shown on television news after first being uploaded to
YouTube. These homemade videos, which were a sensation on the news, initially
prompted me to check out the site.
Incredibly, YouTube viewers watch
100 million videos each day — up from 10 million last year. The most-watched
clip, with over 36+ million views is a compilation of head-butt animations
inspired by the one Zinedine Zidane administered in the 2006 World Cup soccer
game.
YouTube is free. You only
need to sign up if you want to leave comments about the videos, rate them, or
upload your own.
Choose videos from
categories like Recent Videos below, which include viewer ratings, video
length, and description
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