What you didn't know about YouTube.

Top 40 Secrets You Didn't Know About YouTube

This video covers 40 secrets about YouTube, including its origins as a dating website, the first video ever uploaded, and various features and statistics of the platform.

The Origins of YouTube

• YouTube was originally intended to be a dating website where people could upload videos of themselves talking about their ideal partner.

• The founders offered women $20 to upload videos in an attempt to get the site started, but no one accepted.

• Eventually, they opened up the site to all kinds of videos and the first video ever uploaded was just 19 seconds long and featured one of the founders at the zoo.

Milestones on YouTube

• The first video to hit a million views was a Nike ad featuring Ronaldinho.

• The first video to hit 1 billion views was Psy's "Gangnam Style," which broke YouTube's view counter.

• Currently, the most viewed video on YouTube is "Baby Shark Dance" with almost 12 billion views.

• The most liked video on YouTube is "Despacito" with 50 million likes.

• The most searched term on YouTube worldwide is BTS.

Hidden Features of YouTube

• On desktop, you can right-click once on a video to loop it or copy its URL. Right-clicking twice unlocks picture-in-picture mode.

• On mobile devices, you can swipe up to full screen a non-full screen video and swipe down while in full screen mode to minimize it.

Changes Over Time

• In the past, YouTube had a rating system where users could give videos a rating from one to five stars. This was replaced by a like and dislike bar, which has now been reduced to just a like counter.

• Video responses were once allowed on YouTube but were eventually dropped due to low engagement.

• Annotations used to be available for correcting mistakes in videos, but this feature was also removed.

Conclusion

• Despite all the changes over the years, YouTube remains one of the most popular websites on the internet with billions of users worldwide.

YouTube Mysteries

This section covers some of the mysterious and bizarre aspects of YouTube, including the glitch that caused videos to freeze at 301 views, the strange channel Webdriver Torso, and the custom play buttons awarded to channels with millions of subscribers.

The 301 View Glitch

• A glitch on YouTube caused a video's view count to stop updating for a few hours after it hit 301 views.

• This glitch caused confusion among users because this video has exactly 301 views but over 3 million likes.

• Typing "Seinfeld without people" into YouTube leads to a video with no title or description showing what the show would look like with new people.

Webdriver Torso

• Webdriver Torso is a mysterious channel that popped up in 2013 and uploads abstract clips of red and blue rectangles with gibberish titles.

• The channel generated conspiracy theories within the YouTube community until it was revealed to be an internal channel used by Google to test external features before rolling them out.

• To commemorate all the conspiracies generated by Webdriver Torso, Google made it so that searching for it on Google changes its logo to red and blue rectangles.

Custom Play Buttons

• YouTubers can earn silver, gold, diamond play buttons when they reach certain subscriber milestones.

• These play buttons are not made of what you might expect. For example, the silver play button is made of nickel carbon and zinc while the gold one has a layer of real 24 karat gold.

• Channels can buy extra play buttons for their team members when they reach these milestones, but they are not cheap.

YouTube Features You Might Not Know About

This section covers some of the lesser-known features of YouTube, including keyboard shortcuts and custom URLs for sharing specific parts of a video.

Keyboard Shortcuts

• You can use the arrow keys to navigate forward and backward five seconds at a time on a computer.

• The angle bracket keys can be used to go forward or backward one frame at a time, which is useful for catching Easter eggs in videos.

Custom URLs

• Adding "T=" followed by a timestamp to the end of a YouTube URL creates a custom URL that takes viewers directly to that point in the video.

• This feature is useful when sharing specific parts of a video with others.

Surprising Facts About YouTube

This section covers some surprising facts about YouTube, including its ban in certain countries and the longest-ever video uploaded to the platform.

Country Bans

• YouTube is banned in China, Iran, North Korea, and Turkmenistan to limit Western cultural influence on those people.

Longest Video Ever Uploaded

• Before YouTube added its 12-hour limit for videos, there was a channel called Multitaster that made the longest-ever video at 596.5 hours.

• The 12-hour limit was added because no one would watch hundreds of hours in one go and it would cost too much for servers to store those videos online.

• However, this cap does not apply to live streams. While only 12 hours can be saved once the stream ends, there is no interruption during the live stream even if it goes past 12 hours.

• The channel Lo-Fi Girl had a live stream that went on for years until it was suddenly stopped due to a copyright claim, causing them to lose all their content and start over from scratch.

YouTube Lawsuit

• YouTube was sued by a company called Universal Tube and Roll Form Equipment when it first started because they felt like it was infringing on their website, youtube.com.

The History of YouTube

This section discusses the early days of YouTube, including its acquisition by Google and its growth into the massive platform it is today.

The Early Days of YouTube

• In 2007, the first trailer for Grand Theft Auto 4 was released on YouTube and received so many views that the website crashed.

• Users began to upload re-uploaded copies of the trailer, and one user took advantage of this opportunity to instead send people to a Rickroll video.

• When Google acquired YouTube in 2006, it only had 65 employees and was valued at $1.65 billion.

• Today, YouTube has over 3,000 employees and is valued at nearly $200 billion.

The Growth of YouTube

• Every minute that passes, people are uploading 500 hours of content to YouTube.

• If YouTube wanted to manually check each video before it went live, they would need 30,000 employees working every hour just to keep up with the current rate.

• This translates to an enormous amount of content available on the platform for users to watch.