By Meenakshi March 31, 2021
When was the last time you used YouTube? We bet it was just a couple of hours ago!
Evolution of YouTube since its inception in 2005. It’s gone from being a music/video streaming app to a global communication platform. Right from how to learn Latin, and how to bake the perfect cupcakes to which DSLR to add to the cart next, YouTube is your guru. The evolution doesn’t stop, though. Your YouTube channels are always coming up with something new and exciting to offer.
You’re always a step ahead with YouTube.
After Facebook, the world’s most frequented go-to social media platform is YouTube. Approximately 79% of internet users across the world have a YouTube account (Dataeportal, 2019).
YouTube has countless advantages for users everywhere, whether it’s to stream music, look at product reviews, movie trailers, covers, learn, and what have you.
Ever since Google’s acquisition of YouTube from its founding PayPal employees, YouTube has grown unfailingly and exponentially, one of the reasons being the ease of accessibility. Even now, with the launch of YouTube Red and YouTube music, the surprises never seem to end.
Besides being the world’s second-favorite social media platform, it is also the second most used search engine after Google. It enjoys a viewership of around 1,300,000,000 users, and about one billion user hours every day!
Evidently, it would seem that YouTube holds answers to everything. It’s the world’s preferred to search for “How To” videos.
Fun Fact: The most searched “How to” on YouTube is “How to kiss”.
Considering the preference for video content over plain textual content, an increasing number of businesses and brands are turning to YouTube for marketing and promotion of their products and services, either directly through their channels or through YouTube content creators.
Given the worldwide reach of the platform, it is an excellent channel to interact with existing consumers and invite potential consumers.
90% of users say they come across new products and brands through YouTube (Thinkwithgoogle, 2019)!
While it may not elicit a definite purchase from users, it sure gets the ball rolling. Seeing as consumers depend more on video content than anything else, YouTube can introduce an unprecedented number of potential consumers to your brand.
Think about it: How many times have you searched for product reviews or looked for product recommendations on YouTube? Right? You’re not the only one!
YouTube is a go-to learning platform for users across the globe. Whether it’s academics, learning skills like playing musical instruments, cooking, learning how to code, how draw, design, or even how to workout — YouTube has the answer to everything. Users rely on video instructions and guides over texts, as it’s much easier to understand when seen in action.
One of the most prominent advantages of YouTube, especially for businesses – is its global reach. You can potentially communicate with millions of users across the world, even if you only speak one language. What’s more? Closed-captioning helps you gain more viewers as it makes your content more accessible.
Back in 2005, when YouTube was launched, it was introduced as a video-dating platform! In fact, they’d established a tagline for it, too – “Tune in, Hook up”.
But of course, that was very short-lived. No complaints there!
The first video on YouTube was no showstopper. Uploaded on 23rd April 2005, the video featured Jawed Karim on a trip to a zoo in San Diego. It had. 4,282,497 views.
A lot of us are unaware of this, but YouTube is notorious for playing pranks on its users every year on April Fool’s Day! In 2009, YouTube took the internet by storm when it turned the website upside down. The tradition continues.
Only 20% of traffic comes from the US. Since YouTubers are accessible almost all over the world and available in 76 global languages, 80% of the footfall comes from outside the US!
As of this date, the most-watched video on YouTuber is “Baby Shark Dance” with 8 billion views, closely followed by “Desapcito” with 7.2 billion views.
Approximately 500 hours worth of videos is uploaded on YouTube every minute! This translates to 30,000 hours worth of videos every hour! It would take you nearly 82 years of undisturbed watching to finish all of those videos, and that’s if we discount those being uploaded while you continue to watch!
There! We bet some of these insights surprised you as much as they surprised us! Stay tuned for more such interesting tidbits.
