On March 20, 2019, Nintendo announced on Twitter that the company will end the Creators program. In vegas casino app April 2017, YouTube set an eligibility requirement of 10,000 lifetime views for a paid subscription. In January 2010, YouTube introduced a film rentals service, available in many countries, and TV shows can be bought in several countries.
The move was seen as an attempt to ensure that videos being monetized did not lead to controversy, but was criticized for penalizing smaller YouTube channels. YouTube typically takes 45 percent of the advertising revenue from videos in the Partner Program, with 55 percent going to the uploader. Since its founding in 2005, the American video-sharing website YouTube has been faced with a growing number of privacy issues, including allegations that it allows users to upload unauthorized copyrighted material and allows personal information from young children to be collected without their parents’ consent.
YouTube released a mobile app known as YouTube Kids in 2015, which was designed to provide an experience optimized for children. These channel subscriptions complemented the existing Super Chat ability, launched in 2017, which allows viewers to donate between $1 and $500 to have their comment highlighted. This effort was discontinued in January 2018 and relaunched in June, with US$4.99 channel subscriptions. Through this period, YouTube tried several new ways to generate revenue beyond advertisements. The lawsuit was filed due to alleged copyright infringement of Viacom’s material by YouTube.
Karim could not easily find video clips of the incident and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami online, which led to the idea of a video-sharing site. It also offers YouTube Premium, a paid subscription option for watching content without ads. Learn what it takes to succeed as a podcaster on the platform.
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From 2007 to 2009 organizations including Viacom, Mediaset, and the English Premier League have filed lawsuits against YouTube, claiming that it has done too little to prevent the uploading of copyrighted material. YouTube has an estimated 14.8 billion videos with about 4% of those never having a view. On September 23, 2025, YouTube parent company Alphabet announced that it would reinstate creators that were banned for spreading misinformation about COVID-19 and the 2020 U.S. presidential election. On April 9, 2025, YouTube expressed support for the NO FAKES Act of 2025, introduced by Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) and Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and announced an expansion of its pilot program that is designed to identify content generated by AI.
Google’s acquisition launched newfound interest in video-sharing sites; IAC, which now owned Vimeo, focused on supporting the content creators to distinguish itself from YouTube. Video categories on YouTube include music videos, video clips, news, short and feature films, songs, documentaries, movie trailers, teasers, TV spots, live streams, vlogs, and more. In January 2024, YouTube had more than 2.7 billion monthly active users, who collectively watched more than one billion hours of videos every day. In the United States as of November 2020, and June 2021 worldwide, YouTube reserves the right to monetize any video on the platform, even if their uploader is not a member of the YouTube Partner Program. In September 2016, after introducing an enhanced notification system to inform users of these violations, YouTube’s policies were criticized by prominent users, including Philip DeFranco and Vlogbrothers. YouTube Play Buttons, a part of the YouTube Creator Rewards, are a recognition by YouTube of its most popular channels.
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Senate introduced a resolution condemning Joseph Kony 16 days after the «Kony 2012» video was posted to YouTube, with resolution co-sponsor Senator Lindsey Graham remarking that the video «will do more to lead to (Kony’s) demise than all other action combined.» YouTube has enabled people to more directly engage with government, such as in the CNN/YouTube presidential debates (2007) in which ordinary people submitted questions to U.S. presidential candidates via YouTube video, with a techPresident co-founder saying that Internet video was changing the political landscape. The study also concluded that YouTube was becoming an important platform by which people acquire news. A Pew Research Center study reported the development of «visual journalism», in which citizen eyewitnesses and established news organizations share in content creation. By early 2013, Billboard had announced that it was factoring YouTube streaming data into calculation of the Billboard Hot 100 and related genre charts.
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- By 2019, creators were having videos taken down or demonetized when Content ID identified even short segments of copyrighted music within a much longer video, with different levels of enforcement depending on the record label.
- Additionally, to compete with TikTok and Instagram Reels, YouTube released YouTube Shorts, a short-form video platform.
- In April 2012, a court in Hamburg ruled that YouTube could be held responsible for copyrighted material posted by its users.
- Video categories on YouTube include music videos, video clips, news, short and feature films, songs, documentaries, movie trailers, teasers, TV spots, live streams, vlogs, and more.
- It also allowed users to preview videos, share downloaded videos through Bluetooth, and offered more options for mobile data control and video resolution.
- Businesses, schools, government agencies, and other private institutions often block social media sites, including YouTube, due to its bandwidth limitations and the site’s potential for distraction.
Videos of the 2.5% of artists categorized as «mega», «mainstream» and «mid-sized» received 90.3% of the relevant views on YouTube and Vevo in that year. Indie creators have built grassroots followings numbering in the thousands at very little cost or effort, while mass retail and radio promotion proved problematic. Businesses, schools, government agencies, and other private institutions often block social media sites, including YouTube, due to its bandwidth limitations and the site’s potential for distraction. In May 2024, YouTube introduced Playables, a set of around 75 free-to-play games that can be played on the platform.
Watch History: KATSEYE reveals their wildest YouTube recommendations
YouTube had $29.2 billion ads revenue in 2022, up by $398 million from the prior year. According to Google, YouTube had made US$15.1 billion in ad revenue in 2019, in contrast to US$8.1 billion in 2017 and US$11.1 billion in 2018. Google first published exact revenue numbers for YouTube in February 2020 as part of Alphabet’s 2019 financial report. Prior to 2020, Google did not provide detailed figures for YouTube’s running costs, and YouTube’s revenues in 2007 were noted as «not material» in a regulatory filing. The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers and the YouTube Symphony Orchestra selected their membership based on individual video performances. Under YouTube’s changes to its recommendation engine, the most-recommended channel evolved from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (2016) to Fox News (2019).
- In 2020, Roku removed the YouTube TV app from its streaming store after the two companies were unable to reach an agreement.
- In March 2021, Google announced plans to gradually deprecate the Google Play Movies & TV app, and eventually migrate all users to the YouTube app’s Movies & TV store to view, rent and purchase movies and TV shows (first affecting Roku, Samsung, LG, and Vizio smart TV users on July 15).
- The next year, the site celebrated its «100th anniversary» with a range of sepia-toned silent, early 1900s-style films, including a parody of Keyboard Cat.
- The choice of the name youtube.com led to problems for a similarly named website, utube.com.
- The next year, when clicking on a video on the main page, the whole page turned upside down, which YouTube claimed was a «new layout».
YouTube’s $3M fund for creative professionals in L.A.
Any successful complaint about copyright infringement results in a YouTube copyright strike. Despite this advice, many unauthorized clips of copyrighted material remain on YouTube. The company stated the decision was in response to experiments which confirmed that smaller YouTube creators were more likely to be targeted in dislike brigading and harassment. On August 5, 2015, YouTube patched the formerly notorious behavior which caused a video’s view count to freeze at «301» (later «301+») until the actual count was verified to prevent view count fraud. The decision of Alphabet to bring back YouTube creators who engaged in misinformation was criticized for prioritizing «free expression» over «facts». The user must go through age verification via payment, scanned ID, or selfie to access all features if they are detected to be a minor.
The video was retracted after it was found that the ads had been triggered by the use of copyrighted content in the video. The Guardian newspaper, as well as other major British and U.S. brands, similarly suspended their advertising on YouTube in response to their advertising appearing near offensive content. In March 2007, it struck a deal with the BBC for three channels with BBC content, one for news and two for entertainment. The vast majority of videos on YouTube are free to view and supported by advertising. In May 2018, after London Metropolitan Police claimed that drill music videos glamorizing violence gave rise to gang violence, YouTube deleted 30 videos. It also found more «mainstream-adjacent Conservative creators» gaining over alt-right and extremist videos by 2020.
Hurley and Chen said that the original idea for YouTube was a video version of an online dating service and had been influenced by the website Hot or Not. According to a story that has often been repeated in the media, Hurley and Chen developed the idea for YouTube during the early months of 2005, after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen’s apartment in San Francisco. Established media, news, and entertainment corporations have also created and expanded their visibility to YouTube channels to reach bigger audiences. Most content is generated by individuals, including collaborations between YouTubers and corporate sponsors. Since its purchase by Google, YouTube has expanded beyond the core website into mobile apps, network television, and the ability to link with other platforms. From Q to Q3 2024, YouTube’s combined revenue from advertising and subscriptions exceeded $50 billion.
In February 2015, Nintendo agreed to share the revenue with the video creators through the Nintendo Creators Program. In 2010, it was reported that nearly a third of the videos with advertisements were uploaded without permission of the copyright holders. A YouTube spokesperson stated that while the policy itself was not new, the service had «improved the notification and appeal process to ensure better communication to our creators». In May 2007, YouTube launched its Partner Program (YPP), a system based on AdSense which allows the uploader of the video to share the revenue produced by advertising on the site.
Joining the YouTube Kids app, the company created a supervised mode, designed more for tweens, in 2021. In response to EU officials requesting that such services reduce bandwidth to make sure medical entities had sufficient bandwidth to share information, YouTube and Netflix said they would reduce streaming quality for at least thirty days as to cut bandwidth use of their services by 25% to comply with the EU’s request. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when most of the world was under stay-at-home orders, usage of services like YouTube significantly increased.
On YouTube, this will be based on factors such as searches and video history, and the age of the account. As of December 2024update the Playables catalog has over 130 games in various genres, including trivia, action and sports. In December 2024, YouTube began testing a new multiplayer feature for that service, supporting multiplayer functionality across desktop and mobile devices. Starting in June 2024, Google Chrome announced that it would be replacing Manifest V2 in favor of Manifest V3, effectively killing support for most ad-blockers.
In June 2008, a Forbes magazine article projected the 2008 revenue at $200 million, noting progress in advertising sales. According to a 2020 study, viewership of far-right videos on YouTube peaked in 2017 and «a growing body of journalistic evidence» suggested that YouTube was radicalizing young men through its recommendation engine, but that such evidence was «fraught with a bias towards sensationalism». TED curator Chris Anderson described a phenomenon by which geographically distributed individuals in a certain field share their independently developed skills in YouTube videos, thus challenging others to improve their own skills, and spurring invention and evolution in that field. Some YouTube videos have themselves had a direct effect on world events, such as Innocence of Muslims (2012) which spurred protests and related anti-American violence internationally. Whereas YouTube’s inherent ability to allow presidents to directly connect with average citizens was noted, the YouTube content creators’ new media savvy was perceived necessary to better cope with the website’s distracting content and fickle audience. President Obama held a meeting at the White House with leading YouTube content creators not only to promote awareness of Obamacare but more generally to develop ways for government to better connect with the «YouTube Generation».
In February 2017, YouTube Go was launched in India, and expanded in November 2017 to 14 other countries, including Nigeria, Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Kenya, and South Africa. In September 2022, YouTube TV began allowing customers to purchase most of its premium add-ons (excluding certain services such as NBA League Pass and AMC+) without an existing subscription to its base package. Discovery (including among others Bravo, USA Network, Syfy, Disney Channel, CNN, Cartoon Network, E!, Fox Sports 1, Freeform, FX and ESPN). Other functions of Google Play Movies & TV were integrated into the Google TV service. First released on February 15, 2015, as an Android and iOS mobile app, the app has since been released for LG, Samsung, and Sony smart TVs, as well as for Android TV.