Writing on the official YouTube blog, the site explained how YouTube has become one of the world’s defining characteristics. YouTube shapes politics, dictates music fashions, makes the news more accessible than ever and teaches millions of people new things each day.
YouTube presenters have become stars and household names in the same way as television presenters have. This has brought almost unbelievable career opportunities to these remarkable people, many of whom now have YouTube content creation as their primary job.
A successful trailer for upload to YouTube is now a vital component of any blockbuster game or movie launch. YouTube contains videos to make you smile, grimace, laugh and cry. YouTube is used for radically different things by radically different people but no matter which channels you are subscribed to, every YouTube user experiences one common thing: “a portrait of our global culture.”
YouTube has now decided to celebrate this portrait in the best possible way. On the 10th anniversary of the site becoming open to beta testers, YouTube has announced that it will be uploading a video every day for the next 26 days to commemorate and remember the best moments from its history of millions of videos.
Covering everything “from the silly to the profound”, the aim is to create an “A to Z” of YouTube in the past 10 years. The videos will be featured on the YouTube homepage and explored on the YouTube Trends blog.
The first YouTube video was uploaded on April 23rd 2005 but its public history began several months later. The site opened to beta testers in May 2005 and finally became accessible to everyone on the internet in November. Ten years on, the site now has over 1 billion registered users who are watching billions of videos every day. The YouTube blog describes it as “one of the largest and most diverse collections of self-expression in history.”
