Monday, May 17, 2010

Happy Birthday YouTube

When YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim posted a 19 seconds long video called "Me at the Zoo" on April 23, 2005 he and his colleagues could not have imagined that just some five years later they could claim over two billion hits daily. It clearly is ‘the’ video platform of today drawing in more viewers than the three prime time TV stations combined. Whilst many continued to watch TV many started to make TV via YouTube.

However given the average daily YouTube fix is only 15 minutes compared with the 5 hours of TV watched it is easy to see it still has growth potential. It could become a traditional content distributor like the cable channels live streaming TV.

The site was bought by Google near the end of 2006 for $1.65bn and although the site has struggled to reach profitability this could be now changing.

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