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Feb 20, 2011
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10 Fascinating YouTube Facts That May Surprise You

YouTube is huge. Humongous, even. More video content is uploaded to YouTube in a 60 day period than the three major U.S. television networks created in 60 years.

The average YouTube user spends between 15 and 25 minutes a day on the site, but how much do we know about the world’s largest video sharing website? Do you know what the most watched YouTube clip is? Can you name all three founders? Do you know how many times per minute a YouTube link is tweeted?

There is a ton of interesting data, info and stats to be learned about YouTube — we’ve delved deep to find 10 fascinating facts. Have a read and let us know which ones you didn’t know in the comments below.

1. PayPal’s Role in YouTube’s Creation

YouTube was created by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim in 2005. The three founders knew each other from working together at another Internet start up, PayPal. In fact, Hurley designed the PayPal logo after reading a Wired article about the online payment company and e-mailing the startup in search of a job. YouTube was initially funded by bonuses received following the eBay buy-out of PayPal. You could argue that if there was no PayPal, there would be no YouTube.

2. YouTube’s Origins as a Dating Site

The founding trio didn’t come up with the YouTube concept straight away. Legend has it that YouTube began life as a video dating site dubbed “Tune In Hook Up,” said to be influenced by HotorNot. The three ultimately decided not to go that route. The inspiration for YouTube as we know it today is credited to two different events. The first was Karim’s inability to find footage online of Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction,” and the second when Hurley and Chen were unable to share video footage of a dinner party due to e-mail attachment limitations.

3. YouTube Caused Problems For Utube

The domain name YouTube.com was registered on Valentine’s Day in 2005. This, however, caused a huge misunderstanding for Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment based in Perrysburg, Ohio. Its company domain, “utube.com,” was overwhelmed with traffic from people that tried to spell the video site’s name phonetically. The manufacturing company sued YouTube claiming its business was damaged by the video site, but the claims were dismissed. Nowadays, it seems Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment has bowed to the inevitable — its business site has been moved to utubeonline.com and the original utube.com is a video-themed landing page for bad spellers.

4. The First Ever YouTube Video

The first video to ever be uploaded to YouTube isn’t a classic by any means. Shot by Yakov Lapitsky at the San Diego Zoo it shows co-founder Jawed Karim in front of the elephant enclosure going on about long trunks. It has, nonetheless, racked up a very healthy 4,282,497 views since its online debut on April 23, 2005.

5. The First Rickroll

The first instance of a “Rickroll” appeared on YouTube way back in 2007. Apparently, it is the evolution of a 4chan prank that originally “duckrolled” users via links that led to a duck on wheels. Now a classic in its own right, the Rickroll has become what must be the most common online practical joke. Back in 2008, at the height of the phenomenon, a SurveyUSA poll suggested over 18 million U.S. adults had been Rickrolled — perhaps more, given that Rick Astley himself participated in a mass-Rickrolling in that year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Although Rickrolling has perhaps now had its day, we imagine that figure has easily doubled.

6. YouTube’s Annual April Fools Pranks

For the last three years YouTube has pranked its millions of users every April Fools Day. The first was a classic — every video on the site’s homepage was actually a Rickroll. In 2009 YouTube turned the site upside down and in 2010 an attempt to reduce bandwidth costs saw a “TEXTp” mode introduced, which translated colors in the videos into text. We can’t wait to see what YouTube has in store for 2011.

7. Some Jaw-Dropping YouTube Statistics

As of February 2011, YouTube has 490 million unique users worldwide per month, who rack up an estimated 92 billion page views each month. We spend around 2.9 billion hours on YouTube in a month — over 325,000 years. And those stats are just for the main YouTube website — they don’t incorporate embedded videos or video watched on mobile devices.

8. YouTube’s Social Stats

Social media-related YouTube stats are just as impressive. YouTube says that on average there are more than 400 tweets per minute containing a YouTube link. Meanwhile, over on Facebook over 150 years worth of YouTube videos are watched every single day.

9. The Most Viewed, Liked and Favorited Video

Not counting music videos (which due to licensing restrictions are often shown only in the U.S. on YouTube), the most viewed video of all time is the classic “Charlie bit my finger,” with an astounding 282,151,886 (at the time of writing). When you include music videos from the U.S.-only VEVO site, then the crown goes to Justin Beiber, whose “Baby” video has over 466 million views and counting.

Did you know you can view the “YouTube Charts” at any time to see continually updated info about what’s popular?

10. The YouTube “Snake” Easter Egg Game

YouTube has a fun Easter egg that will let you play a Snake-esque game within the video window. The clip above will give you a demo, but it’s simple to execute if you’re keen to try it out. Head over to YouTube, click on a recent video from any category, pause it and then hit the left and up arrow keys at the same time. Enjoy!

More Fun Facts from Mashable:

– 10 Fun Facts You Didn’t Know About Google
– 10 Fascinating Facts You Didn’t Know About Apple
– 10 Fun Microsoft Facts You Might Not Know
– 10 Fascinating Facebook Facts
– 10 Entertaining eBay Facts You Might Not Know

Image courtesy of codenamecueball

More About: facts, Google, Lists, paypal, trending, vevo, video, youtube

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Posted:
Feb 19, 2011
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Thanks to Mashable’s Socially Savvy Supporters

Thanks to this week’s advertisers and partners for enabling us to bring you the latest social media news and resources. Mashable’s sponsors are as social media savvy as our readers!

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This week, our valued sponsors are: Level 3 Communications, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon, LogMeIn Ignition, PrimeSense, StrataScale, CUNY School of Professional Studies, Sprout Social, Sourcebits, Oneupweb, SoftLayer, Site24x7, Atlantic.Net, SRDS, Webtrends Apps, Buddy Media, Gillette, Clickatell, Microsoft BizSpark, MaxCDN, and Eventbrite.

Level 3 Communications is an international provider of fiber-based communications services. Level 3 is committed to carrying digital media from anywhere to anywhere, in whatever format needed.

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Posted:
Feb 18, 2011
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Hear a Song You Like While Out & About? Make a Playlist via Twitter

It happens all the time — you’re out at a bar and a friend goes, “Hey, dude, you should totally check out Explosions in My Mind’s Sky, they’re like the raddest band ever” (yes, your friend was an extra in Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure).

The band does, indeed, sound interesting, but you know you’ll forget the name by the time you get home, and, being that it’s the digital age, it’s not like you carry around a pen or anything. So you forget about… uh… what was the name of that band again?

Enter Sndchck. So what is Sndchck (aside from yet another startup lacking vowel)? Well, it’s like Instapaper for music.

This hack, which was dreamed up during Music Hack Day by the TargetSpot development team, uses a slew of APIs and tools (The Echo Nest, Last.fm, Bandcap, Twilio, Twitter, MongoDB, HTML5, etc) to create a simple way to put a pin in bands, via Twitter, for later consumption.

So let’s say you’re at the aforementioned bar and your friend mentions a band. All you have to do is tweet, for example: @brenna_E pulp @sndchck http://sndchck.com (Sndchck’s site will tell you to just tweet the artist name and @sndchck, but I’ve found that you have to add your own Twitter handle and a URL for the website to make the service work).

When you get home, go to the Sndchck website and log in via Twitter, and you’ll find a playable track listing of songs from that artist. Friends can also send you music by tweeting your handle, the artist name and @sndchck. One of the founders tweeted Arcade Fire at me, which is why it’s on my list (don’t worry, I know who they are).

“Our goal for Music Hack Day was to get the core foundation in place,” says Ricky Robinett, one of the Sndchck founders. “Now that we’ve caught up on sleep, we’re hoping to fix bugs and roll out new features very quickly. A couple features we have in the pipeline are: Making the SMS functionality available to all users; integrating SoundCloud as an audio provider; and making it easy for new users to find out about the site.”

What do you think of Sndchck? Would you use it to discover — and remember — new bands?

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, deeAuvil

More About: design-and-dev, hack, music-hack-day, sndchck, twitter

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Posted:
Feb 17, 2011
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TED Launches Quora-Like Platform for Intelligent Discussion

TED, an organization best known for its annual gathering of top thought leaders, launched a social discussion platform on its website today. The move is part of a larger effort to spread, as TED’s motto goes, “ideas worth spreading” beyond the 1,300-attendee, five-day conference.

“TED Conversations” will be a question and answer forum similar to Stack Overflow or Quora, but with a few important differences. Conversations will take three forums: questions, ideas and debates. They’ll also be assigned an expiration date between one day and two weeks from their start. (TED conference presentations also have time restrictions of 18 minutes.) Both of these features are intended to encourage thoughtful conversation and participation by leaders with tight schedules.

Which brings us to the third thing that TED hopes will set its platform apart — participation by TED thought leaders. Sometimes these leaders will be scheduled to host conversations. At launch, for instance, Seth Godin, game designer Jane McGonigal and Rhode Island School of Design President John Maeda will hold discussions.

Whether a discussion is launched by one of these thought leaders or a mere mortal, there is an option to link it to one of the TEDTalk videos that already draw about 15 million visits to the site each month. It’s a way for website visitors to extend their interaction with the conference without attending.

“We curate a really strong stage program, but that’s only half of what attendees [at the physical conference] get,” says June Cohen, executive producer of TED Media. “The other half is what they get out of the interactions with the other really engaged people who have just taken in the program with them.”

TED has made other efforts to become more global. TEDTalks launched in 2006 to give the web access to the presentations at TED, and the nearly two-year-old TED Open Translation Project works to translate the talks for the vast audience of non-English speakers.

The new platform will contribute to this goal as well as be a source of revenue for the non-profit. TED Conversations launch partner, General Electric, will hold a conversation around sustainable energy solutions, which will inform GE’s Ecomagination Challenge. Director of Partnerships Ronda Carnegie said TED is open to similar partnerships with other brands in the future.

Image courtesy of iStockphoto, hiob

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