YouTube

Also known as youtu.be, www.youtube.com, Youtube.com, YouTube.com

YouTube is an American online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen, who were former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in San Bruno, California, it is the second-most-visited website in the world, after Google itself. In January 2024, YouTube had reached more than 2.7billion monthly active users, who collectively consumed more than one billion hours of video content every day. , videos were being uploaded to the platform at a rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute, and , there were approximately

OverviewAI-generated

YouTube is an online video platform and website founded in 2005 by Steve Chen, Jawed Karim, and Chad Hurley. Based in the United States, the service allows users to produce and consume streaming media, including YouTube Kids and YouTube Music. Its official motto is "Broadcast Yourself." The platform operates under an end-user license agreement and is available in multiple languages.

The site is programmed in Python and Go, supporting file formats such as QuickTime File Format, MPEG-4 Part 14, Audio Video Interleave, and WebM. YouTube has received Peabody Awards and is recognized in the Peabody Award collection. It maintains an official website and blog at specified URLs. The platform holds an Alexa rank of 2 and is referenced by 152,341 other encyclopedia articles.

Synthesized by Vinony from 24 facts across 3 sources: Wikidata, Vinony collections, Vinony graph. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.

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Key facts

Website.name: YouTube
Website.logo_caption: Logo used since February 2025
Website.screenshot: File:Youtube interface, showing search results of Burger Recipe.png
Website.screenshot_size: 280px
Website.caption: YouTube search results, May 2025
Website.company_type: Subsidiary
Website.type: Online video platform, social media platform
Website.location: 901 Cherry AvenueSan Bruno, California
Website.country: United States
Website.area_served: Worldwide (except blocked countries)
Website.owner: Alphabet Inc.
Website.revenue: billion (2023)
Website.parent: Google LLC (2006–present)
Website.ipv6: Yes
Website.content_license: Uploader holds copyright (standard license); Creative Commons can be selected.
Website.programming_language: Python (core/API), C (through CPython), C++, Java (through Guice platform), Go, JavaScript (UI)
Website.advertising: Google AdSense
Website.users: 2.7billion MAU (January 2024)

via Wikipedia infobox

~40 min read

Encyclopedic overview

41 sections

Contents

<span class="anchor" id="Company history"></span><span class="anchor" id="Website history"></span> History
Founding and initial growth (2005–2006)
"Broadcast Yourself" era (2006–2013)
Susan Wojcicki's leadership (2014–2023)
Neal Mohan leadership (2023–present)
Senior leadership
Features
Videos
Copyright issues
Content ID
Russia
April Fools gags
Services
YouTube Premium
YouTube Kids
YouTube Music
YouTube Movies & TV
YouTube Primetime Channels
YouTube TV
YouTube Go
YouTube Shorts
YouTube Stories
YouTube VR
Playables
Automatic language dubbing
Criticism and controversies
Privacy concerns
Censorship and bans
State censorship of YouTube content
Bans by YouTube
Social impact
Finances
Partnership with corporations
2017 advertiser boycott
YouTuber earnings
Revenue to copyright holders
See also
Notes
References
Further reading
External links

YouTube is an American online video-sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen who were all former employees at PayPal. Headquartered in San Bruno, California, it is the second-most-visited website in the world, after Google itself. In January 2024, YouTube had reached more than 2.7 billion monthly active users, who collectively watched more than one billion hours of video every day. As of May 2019, videos were being uploaded to the platform at a rate of more than 500 hours of video per minute, and as of mid-2024, there were approximately 14.8 billion videos in total.

On November 13, 2006, YouTube was purchased by Google for 1.65 billion USD (equivalent to $2.44 billion in 2025). Google expanded YouTube's business model from generating revenue through advertisements alone to paid offerings such as movies and exclusive programming explicitly produced for YouTube. It also offers YouTube Premium, a paid subscription option for watching videos without ads. YouTube incorporated the Google AdSense program, generating more revenue for both YouTube and approved users. In 2023, YouTube's advertising revenue totaled $31.7 billion, a 2% increase from the $31.1 billion reported in 2022. From Q4 2023 to Q3 2024, YouTube's combined revenue from advertising and subscriptions exceeded $50 billion.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “YouTube” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.