Youtube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. YouTube was created in mid-February
2005 by three former PayPal employees.<2> The San Bruno-based service uses Adobe Flash technology to display a wide variety of video
content, including movie clips, TV clips and music videos, as well as amateur content such as videoblogging and short original videos. In October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had reached a deal to acquire the company for US$1.65 billion in Google stock. The deal closed on November 13, 2006.<3>
Unregistered users can watch most videos on the site, while
registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos.
Some videos are available only to users of age 18 or older (e.g. videos
containing potentially offensive content). The uploading of pornography or videos containing nudity is prohibited. Related videos, determined by title and tags,
appear onscreen to the right of a given video. In YouTube''''s second
year, functions were added to enhance user ability to post video
''''responses'''' and subscribe to content feeds.
Few statistics are publicly available regarding the number of videos
on YouTube. However, in July 2006, the company revealed that more than
100 million videos were being watched every day, and 2.5 billion videos
were watched in June 2006. 50,000 videos were being added per day in
May 2006, and this increased to 65,000 by July.<4>
In August 2006, The Wall Street Journal
published an article revealing that YouTube was hosting about 6.1
million videos (requiring about 45 terabytes of storage space), and had
about 500,000 user accounts.<5> As of February 20, 2008, a YouTube search for "*" returns about 73,100,000 videos <1>, and about 2,750,000 user channels. <2> (The asterisk is a commonly used wildcard character in search engines, therefore showing all videos).