Jump to content

YouTube: Difference between revisions

Edit links
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Browse history interactively
← Previous editNext edit →
Content deleted Content added
VisualWikitext
AntiVandalBot (talk | contribs)
258,750 edits
m BOT - rv 163.6.93.10 (talk) to last version by Moyogo
Jonivy (talk | contribs)
72 edits
Line 176: Line 176:
On their 6:30 PM bulletin on [[June 1]], [[2006]], [[ITV News]] in the UK reported that YouTube and sites like it were encouraging violence and bullying amongst teenagers, who were filming fights on their [[mobile phone]]s (''see [[happy slapping]]''), and then uploading them to YouTube. While the site provides a function for reporting excessively violent videos, the news report stated that communication with the company was difficult. <ref>[[ITV News]], 6:30 PM bulletin on [[ITV1]], [[1 June]] [[2006]]</ref>
On their 6:30 PM bulletin on [[June 1]], [[2006]], [[ITV News]] in the UK reported that YouTube and sites like it were encouraging violence and bullying amongst teenagers, who were filming fights on their [[mobile phone]]s (''see [[happy slapping]]''), and then uploading them to YouTube. While the site provides a function for reporting excessively violent videos, the news report stated that communication with the company was difficult. <ref>[[ITV News]], 6:30 PM bulletin on [[ITV1]], [[1 June]] [[2006]]</ref>



==Influence==
The popularity of YouTube has inspired other websites into creating new features or even entire spin-off sites for hosting purposes. These include [[TinyPic]]'s video hosting feature and MySpace Video, plus many others. <ref>{{cite web
| url = http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20060110/0735214.shtml
| title = So That's Why MySpace Blocked YouTube
| accessdate = 2006-07-28
| author = Carlos
| date = 2006-01-10
| format =
| work =
| publisher = Techdirt.com
| language =
}}</ref>
The embeddable nature of YouTube has bred several "best of" sites as well. These sites range from small, non-commercial, independently programmed endeavours, to larger, ambitious, hierarchically displayed, viewer-rated sites.


==See also==
==See also==

Revision as of 20:51, 28 September 2006

YouTube
Company typePrivate
IndustryInternet services
FoundedFebruary 2005
FounderChad Hurley
Jawed Karim
Steve Chen Edit this on Wikidata
HeadquartersSan Mateo, California, USA
Key people
Chad Hurley, Founder & CEO
Steve Chen, Founder & CTO
Jawed Karim, Founder & Advisor
Number of employees
60 (2006)
Websitewww.youtube.com

YouTube is a popular free web site which lets users upload, view, and share video clips. Founded in February 2005 by three early employees of PayPal, the San Mateo-based service utilizes Adobe Flash technology to display video. The wide variety of site content includes movie and TV clips and music videos, as well as amateur content such as videoblogging. Despite YouTube's huge user base, content library, and hit count popularity, it is still a very small company at the administrative level, staffed by only about 60 employees[1].

Introduction

Background

YouTube,Inc. was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal.[2] Prior to PayPal, Hurley studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.[3] The domain name "YouTube.com" was activated on February 15, 2005, [4] and the website was developed over the following months. The creators offered the public a preview of the site in May 2005, and six months later, YouTube made its official debut.

The company's humble beginnings in a garage and commitment to offering free services necessitated outside financial backing. In November of 2005, venture capital firm Sequoia Capital invested an initial $3.5 million; [5] additionally, Roelof Botha, partner of the firm and former CFO of PayPal, joined the YouTube board of directors. In April 2006, Sequoia put an additional $8 million into the company, which had experienced a boom of popularity and growth in just its first few months. [6]

Video uploads

About over 65,000 videos are uploaded on the site each day. They include things such as music, video games and more. Videos can be uploaded for free, as long as they are 100MB or less and do not contain copyrighted material. A registered account is needed to add the videos.

Service

The slogan "Broadcast Yourself" reflects the basic intent of the site's creators: to provide hosting for videos. Visitors are encouraged to register an account, which allows them to upload videos as well as view them. For example, personal content like home movies can be shared with family and friends, or amateur filmmakers can hope to gain a larger audience for their work. Video as a blogging medium has especially increased in popularity because of YouTube (and led to minor celebrity for some bloggers, such as Nornna). It is also suggested that internet video be considered a legitimate choice next to more traditional media, and possibly better, given the increased potential for customized content. [citation needed]

Apart from original work, and in spite of site policy against copyright infringement, the site is also host to many clips from traditional media. This content ranges from works such as fan-created music videos and dubbed parodies, which have at least some degree of originality, to whole and/or unaltered scenes, commercials, music videos, short films, and so on. As with the music community's conflict over filesharing, there is debate as to whether this practice may prove beneficial to the copyright holders, or simply cause harm.

Facts and stats

Popularity

At present, YouTube is one of the fastest-growing websites on the World Wide Web [7], and is ranked as the 10th most popular website on Alexa, far outpacing even MySpace's growth. [8] According to a July 16 2006 announcement, 100 million clips are viewed daily on YouTube, with an additional 65,000 new videos uploaded per 24 hours. The site has almost 20 million visitors each month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings [9], where around 44% are female, 56% male, and the 12-17 year old age group is dominant [10] .

Valuation

Although YouTube's potential market value in an acquisition is pure speculation, an article in the New York Post suggested on July 23 2006 that YouTube may be worth anywhere from $600 million to $1 billion. [11] On August 22 2006 the Web 2.0 blog Techcrunch suggested that Grouper's acquisition price of $65 million implies a YouTube valuation of approximately $2 billion. [2] On August 24 2006 an article on CNET's News.com exclaimed "YouTube could be a steal at $1 billion" [12]

Word spreads and traditional media take notice

In its short time on the web, YouTube has grown quickly and received much attention. Online word-of-mouth has been primarily responsible for YouTube's growth since its inception, and gave the site its first surge of publicity when it hosted the popular Saturday Night Live short Lazy Sunday. [13] However, YouTube's official policy prohibits submission of copyrighted material, and NBC Universal, owners of SNL, soon decided to take action.

In February 2006, NBC asked for the removal of some of its copyrighted content from YouTube, including Lazy Sunday and 2006 Olympics clips. [5][14] The following month, in an attempt to strengthen its policy against copyright infringement, YouTube set a 10-minute maximum limit on video length (except for content submitted via its Director Program, which specifically hosts original material by amateur filmmakers). However, the real cutoff is 10:58. This restriction is often circumvented by uploaders, who instead split their original video into smaller segments, each shorter than the 10-minute limit.

TV networks see potential

Though YouTube had done its part to comply with NBC's demands, the incident made the news, giving YouTube its most prominent publicity yet. As the site continued to grow, NBC began to realize the possibilities, and in June 2006 made an unusual move. The network had reconsidered its actions and was announcing a strategic partnership with YouTube. Under the terms of the partnership, an official NBC channel will be set up on YouTube, showcasing promotional clips for the series The Office. YouTube will also promote NBC's videos throughout its site.[15]

CBS, which had previously also asked YouTube to remove several of its clips, followed suit in July 2006. In a statement indicative of how the traditional media industry's perception of YouTube (and similar sites) has changed, Sean McManus, president of CBS News and Sports noted:

Our inclination now is, the more exposure we get from clips like that, the better it is for CBS News and the CBS television network, so in retrospect we probably should have embraced the exposure, and embraced the attention it was bringing CBS, instead of being parochial and saying ‘let’s pull it down.’ [16]

In August of 2006, YouTube announced that, within 18 months, it hopes to offer every music video ever created, while still remaining free of charge. Warner Music Group and EMI have confirmed that they are among the companies in talks to implement this plan. [17] In September Warner Music and YouTube signed a deal, in which YouTube will be allowed to host every music video Warner produced while sharing a portion of the advertisement income. Additionally, user created videos on YouTube will be allowed to use Warner songs in their soundtracks. [18]

New problems arise

In spite of having formed productive relationships with several major media companies, YouTube's copyright controversies are still not over. TV journalist Robert Tur filed the first lawsuit against the company in summer 2006, alleging copyright infringement for hosting a number of famous news clips without permission. The case has yet to be resolved. [19] [20]

Accessibility

  • On YouTube: Users may submit videos in several common file formats (such as .mpeg and .avi). YouTube automatically converts them to Flash Video (with extension .flv) and makes them available for online viewing. Flash Video is a popular video format among large hosting sites due to its wide compatability.
  • Outside YouTube: Each video is accompanied by the full HTML codes for linking to it and/or embedding it within another page; a small addition to the code for the latter will make the video autoplay when the page is accessed. These simple cut-and-paste options are popular particularly with users of social/networking sites. Poor experiences have however been cited by members of such sites[21], where autoplaying embedded YouTube videos has been reported to slow down page loading time or even to cause browsers to crash.
  • General Concerns: Videos can be downloaded off YouTube's website and viewed offline with various video player applications; however, this may be a violation of copyright.
  • Download Quality: With the update to Flash Gui file formats, YouTube has had problems with videos loading altogether on the Internet Explorer and Firefox web browsers. No news has been given for when this will be repaired.

YouTube policy does not allow content to be uploaded by anyone not permitted by copyright law to do so, and the company frequently removes uploaded infringing content. Nonetheless, a large amount of it continues to be uploaded. Generally, unless the copyright holder reports them, YouTube only discovers these videos via indications within the YouTube community through self-policing. The primary way in which YouTube identifies the content of a video is through the search terms that uploaders associate with clips. Some users have taken to creating alternative words as search terms to be entered when uploading specific type of files (similar to the deliberate misspelling of band names on MP3 filesharing networks). For a while, members could also report one another. The service offers a flagging feature, intended as a means for reporting questionable content, including that which might constitute copyright infringement. However, the feature can be susceptible to abuse; for a time, some users were flagging other users' original content for copyright violations, purely out of spite. YouTube proceeded to remove copyright infringement from the list of offenses flaggable by members.

Revenue model

YouTube states that its business model is advertising-based. Some industry commentators have speculated that YouTube's running costs — specifically the bandwidth required — may be as high as US$1 million per-month, [22] thereby fuelling criticisms that the company does not have a viably implemented business model. Advertisements were launched on the site beginning in March 2006. In April, YouTube started using Google AdSense.

Violence

On their 6:30 PM bulletin on June 1, 2006, ITV News in the UK reported that YouTube and sites like it were encouraging violence and bullying amongst teenagers, who were filming fights on their mobile phones (see happy slapping), and then uploading them to YouTube. While the site provides a function for reporting excessively violent videos, the news report stated that communication with the company was difficult. [23]


See also

Similar websites

Notes and references

  1. ^ "YouTube Hires Its First CFO: Yahoo's Treasurer". September 2, 2006. Retrieved 2006-09-09. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)
  2. ^ Graham, Jefferson (2005-11-21). "Video websites pop up, invite postings". USATODAY.com. Retrieved 2006-07-28.
  3. ^ University of Illinois Department of Computer Science (2006). "YouTube: Sharing Digital Camera Videos"
  4. ^ "Info for YouTube.com". Alexa.com. 2006-07-26. Retrieved 2006-07-26.
  5. ^ a b Woolley, Scott (2006-03-13). ʝ "Raw and Random". Forbes.com. Retrieved 2006-07-28. {{cite news}}: Check |url= value (help)
  6. ^ Sequoia invests 11.5 million total in YouTube, accessed July 7, 2006
  7. ^ "YouTube Fastest Growing Website" Advertising Age
  8. ^ "Info for YouTube.com". Alexa.com. 2006-07-26. Retrieved 2006-07-26.
  9. ^ "YouTube serves up 100 million videos a day online". USATODAY.com. 2006-07-16. Retrieved 2006-07-28.
  10. ^ "YouTube U.S. Web Traffic Grows 17 Percent Week Over Week, According to Nielsen//Netratings" (Press Release). Netratings, Inc. 2006-07-21. Retrieved 2006-09-12.
  11. ^ "SUN VALLEY BUZZ BOOSTS YOUTUBE TOWARD $1B" New York Post
  12. ^ "YouTube could be a steal at $1 billion" CNet
  13. ^ http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060329-6481.html YouTube hosts Lazy Sunday, accessed July 7, 2006
  14. ^ NBC Pressures Websites on Video Clips by Andrew Wallenstein, 22 February 2006, Backstage.com
  15. ^ [1]
  16. ^ Montopoli, Brian (2006-07-17). "CBS To YouTube: Who Loves You, Baby?". CBSNews.com. Retrieved 2006-07-28.
  17. ^ "YouTube aims to show music videos". BBC NEWS. 2006-08-16.
  18. ^ "Warner Music coming to YouTube". arstechnica.com. 2006-09-18.
  19. ^ Jones, K.C. (2006-07-18). "Journalist Sues YouTube For Copyright Infringement". InformationWeek.com. Retrieved 2006-07-28.
  20. ^ Montgomery, James (2006-07-19). "YouTube Slapped With First Copyright Lawsuit For Video Posted Without Permission". MTV.com. Retrieved 2006-07-28.
  21. ^ http://news.livejournal.com/92728.html
  22. ^ Frommer, Dan. "Your Tube, Whose Dime?". Forbes'. April 27, 2006.
  23. ^ ITV News, 6:30 PM bulletin on ITV1, 1 June 2006
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=YouTube&oldid=78373139"