10 things you probably didn't know about YouTube

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2011 Mar 01
Posted by Neps Firmalan
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Behind the gazillions of YouTube videos and the trillions of minutes we waste spend on watching them are some interesting facts about our fave video-streaming site. Check them out in the gallery below.

Source Mashable

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PayPal is YouTube's pal

YouTube's founding trio of Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim actually knew each other from their PayPal days. What's more is that YouTube's initial funding came from the bonuses the 3 received after eBay's buyout of PayPal.

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The first Rickroll

The first instance of Rickrolling (tricking someone into watching a lame video by enticing them with a link with an interesting title) started in May 2007. A link posted on 4chan was supposedly the trailer for Grand Theft Auto IV, but in reality, it led to the video of Rick Astley's 1987 hit Never Gonna Give You Up. The prank then spread to YouTube, and thus its title of being the Web's most popular form of practical joke.

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YouTube's April Fool's pranks

For 3 years now, YouTube has been coming up with practical joke every April 1. The first of these YouTube April Fool's pranks was the Rickroll home page, where every video on YouTube's landing page was a, well, Rickroll. This was followed in 2009, when the people behind the site turned it upside down. Last year, the TEXTp mode was introduced, which translated videos into text, reportedly to reduce bandwidth costs. Were you among those fooled?

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5 April Fool's jokes that hit the Web

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YouTube by the numbers

Just how big is YouTube? As of February 2011, it has about 490 million monthly unique users who produce an estimated 92 billion page views in 30 days. Meanwhile, we spend about 2.9 billion hours watching videos (that's over 325,000 years) – all in one month! And that's excluding embedded videos. Whew.

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The first-ever YouTube video

This video of Jawed Karim (one of YouTube's founders) hanging out at a zoo is actually the first video uploaded to YouTube. Yes, it may be simple or mundane, but it does have over 4.4 million views (and over 25,700 'likes'). More importantly, it helped pave the way for the millions upon millions of clips that eventually found their place on the site – all for our enjoyment.

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YouTube's social stats

According to YouTube, there are, on the average, over 400 Tweets per minute containing a YouTube link and 150 years' worth of YouTube videos viewed on Facebook daily. That's impressive, to say the least.

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YouTube vs. uTube

When the domain name YouTube was registered back in 2005, it caused a lot of problems for another site called uTube (for manufacturing company Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment). The latter was overwhelmed with traffic coming from users who mistyped YouTube. uTube then took to the court and sued YouTube, to no avail. The case was dismissed and utubeonline.com was born.

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YouTube's dating-site roots

Apparently, the founding trio's original idea for YouTube was for it to become a video-dating site called 'Tune In Hook Up,' influenced by Hot or Not. Obviously, a different route was taken, owing to a couple of problems, one being Karim’s inability to find Janet Jackson’s 'wardrobe malfunction' clip online. We couldn't be more thankful.

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YouTube 'Snake' game

Have you tried playing Snake on YouTube? If you haven't, then click on any YouTube video, wait for that circle thingy to appear while it loads, press on the left or up directional button, and voila! A great way to kill time, especially if your Internet connection is slow.

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And the most viewed, non-MTV YouTube video is...

...Charlie bit my finger, which has garnered over 285 million views. If we include music videos, then Justin Bieber's Baby takes the cake to the tune of 475 million. Yep, on YouTube, babies rule.

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Guest March 2, 2011; 12:24 pm Report Abuse

i already read this article at Mashable
(http://mashable.com/2011/02/19/youtube-facts/)

it seems you forgot to credit them.

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