YouTube has become the most popular video-sharing site in history. It belongs to Google and is the second most visited website on Earth. YouTube was founded in 2005 by three former PayPal employees – Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. They wanted to share movies with friends that they had never seen before, so they created an easy way to do it – upload the movie for others to see. The website was officially launched on April 23, 2006 with only 60 content partners. YouTube remains one of the most popular websites today, attracting over 1 billion users each month. With 800 hours of content uploaded every minute, it’s no wonder that there are over 100 million users logging into the site every day.
Google bought YouTube for $ 1.65 billion in 2006, and YouTube has been part of the company ever since. YouTube’s mission is to “give people a voice and show them the world” and it works. It allows anyone with an internet connection to share their videos with the rest of the world. YouTube gives people the opportunity to spread their news, which is especially important in countries where journalists are silenced or the government controls traditional media. In 2017, YouTube ad revenue was $ 12 billion, and Google is now working on a subscription service called YouTube Red, which will include ad-free videos as well as special shows and videos for $ 12 a month.
Google continues to be the majority owner of YouTube, but has transferred some ownership over time to many of its own managers, employees, and companies. In September 2018, documents revealed that Google is negotiating the sale of a portion of YouTube shares to a group led by Silver Lake Partners, which would help Google circumvent some shareholders’ voting rights. For example, the Silver Lake investor group would not be able to keep Erskine Bowles or Susan Wojcicki – two directors whom the current management finds helpful. The documents show that the negotiations are at an early stage and it is possible that they will not come to fruition at all. Some companies have expressed concern over YouTube’s extreme content, and some have even pulled ads from the site after discovering that adult abuse videos were being advertised.