YouTube at 20 .The Video-Sharing Site That Conquered the Internet

TechSpot: “YouTube is a massive competitor to TV, an engagement beast, uploading as much new video every five minutes as the 2,400 hours BBC Studios produces in a whole year. The 26-year-old YouTube star MrBeast earned US$85 million in 2024 from videos – ranging from live Call of Duty play-alongs to handing out 1,000 free cataract operations. As a business, YouTube is now worth some $455 billion. That is a spectacular 275 times return on the $1.65 billion Google paid for it in 2006. For the current YouTube value, Google could today buy British broadcaster ITV about 127 times. YouTube has similar gross revenue to streaming giant Netflix – but without the financial inconvenience of making shows, since most of the content is uploaded for free.

• YouTube has 2.7 billion monthly active users, or 40% of the entire global population outside China, where it is blocked. It is also now one of the biggest music streaming sites, and the second biggest social network (to Facebook), plus a paid broadcast channel for 100 million subscribers.
• YouTube has built a video Library of Babel, its expansive shelves lined eclectically with Baby Shark Dance, how to fix septic tanks, who would win a shooting war between Britain and France … and quantum physics.
• The site has taken over global children’s programming to the point where Wired magazine pointed out that the future of this genre actually “isn’t television.” But there are flaws, too: it has been described as a conduit for disinformation by fact checkers.
• So how did all that happen? Eight key innovations have helped YouTube achieve its success…”