YouTube at 20

You may have missed it, but last week marked a milestone for YouTube: twenty years ago, on April 23, 2005, YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim posted the very first YouTube video, titled "Me at the Zoo." It’s not very long, the production values aren’t great, and the main import is that elephants have very long trunks, but few could have predicted the cultural presence that YouTube has become.

Just a few facts to set the stage:

• It has over 20 billion uploaded videos, with some 20 million uploaded daily;
• It has 125 million subscribers, and 122 million daily viewers;
• 1 billion hours of content are viewed daily, generating over 3.5 billion likes and over100 million comments daily;
• It is the #1 streaming platform – 50% more than Netflix, its nearest competitor.

The Pew Research Center has done extensive research on it, and offers these five key findings:

• “More U.S. adults use YouTube than any other online platform we’ve asked about. As of 2024, 85% of adults say they ever use YouTube.
• Across age groups, majorities of adults use YouTube. More than nine-in-ten adults under 50 say they use the site, as do 86% of adults ages 50 to 64. Even among adults 65 and older – who are generally less likely than younger people to use various online platforms – 65% use the video sharing platform.
• An overwhelming majority of U.S. teens also use YouTube. Nine-in-ten U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 say they ever use YouTube, though this is down slightly from 95% in 2022. And most teens go on YouTube daily (73%).
• Around a third of U.S. adults say they regularly get news from YouTube. The share of Americans who get news on YouTube has risen in recent years, from 23% in 2020 to 32% in 2024.
• Around a quarter of adult YouTube users in the U.S. (24%) say they regularly get news from news influencers on any social media site. A recent Pew Research Center analysis of news influencers found that 44% of those in our sample are on YouTube,”

Talk all you want about TikTok, Facebook, or Instagram, but YouTube beats all of them. It’s not just cat videos or even Baby Shark Dance.  

Credit: Pew Research Center

Not only does YouTube take in about $36b in ad revenue, it shares some of that with creators through its Partner Program, paying out around $25b per year (MrBeast has done particularly well, taking in over $80 million annually). David Craig, who teaches media and culture at the University of Southern California at Annenberg, told CBS News: "YouTube came along and said, 'Why don't we give you some advertising revenue in exchange for the fact that you're helping us grow our service?'"

As a result, Professor Craig continued: “They've been surveying young people, and they've all said they want to grow up to be a creator or an influencer more than a celebrity – or, I'm sorry to say, a journalist."

But what you think you know about YouTube based on your feeds is probably misleading. Thomas Germain did a deep dive on the YouTube algorithms for BBC. Ryan McGrady, senior researcher at the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure at the University of Massachusetts, explained to him:

The conversations we're having about YouTube are based on an impoverished view of what the platform really is. When we just focus on what's popular, we miss how the vast majority of people actually use YouTube as uploaders, and overlooking the role it plays in our society.

According to Dr. McGrady’s analysis, the median video has only been viewed 41 times. If a video gets as little as 130 views, it is in the upper third of all videos. Mr. Germain concludes: “In other words, the vast majority of YouTube is practically invisible.”

 Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure (iDPI) at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

That’s OK. Dr. McGrady says: "YouTube isn't just a vehicle for professionals. We rely on it as the default video arm of the internet. YouTube is infrastructure. It's a critical tool that regular people use to communicate."

A third of the U.S. population is under 25 and so don’t recall the internet before YouTube, so, yes, to them it is basic infrastructure, like search or email might be to older generations.

YouTube CEO Neal Mohan also sees it as a communication platform, telling CBS News:

But it's fundamentally a platform for freedom of speech…I think it goes back to we, as human beings, are social beings. We connect with other people. We are storytellers. That is what happens billions of times a day on YouTube. And it's back to our mission: give everyone a voice and show them the world.

Ethan Zuckerman, who leads the YouTube research as the director of the University of Massachusetts' Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure, told Mr. Germain that, without the algorithm's recommendations, YouTube is a study of the everyday, people documenting small moments in their lives and using the available tools to exchange ideas.

"As researchers, we spend a lot of time with this stuff. It can be a lot like looking at people's personal snapshots," Dr. Zuckerman says. "Most of it's boring, but sometimes it's poignant, even haunting. And every so often, you get something that feels incredibly revealing about how human beings communicate."

Mr. Germain ended up being quite touched by his exploration:

The YouTube we talk about – the one full of celebrities, scandals and manufactured virality – only tells part of the story. The majority exists in quiet moments, in shaky camera work and voices meant for no one in particular.  I watched hundreds of these videos. Everything one of them is public, but it's also clear that most people didn't upload this content for strangers. It was like being let in on a secret, a sprawling, uncurated documentary of human life.

“Me at the Zoo” fits right in after all.

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One can think of YouTube as social media, as a streaming platform, as a creator platform, as storage for personal memories, or as core internet infrastructure. All of those are correct, but twenty years is a long time in tech. Google and Facebook are each showing their age, and one has to wonder what might displace YouTube. For a time TikTok looked like it might be the thing, but perhaps not so much now.

AI is going to further supercharge YouTube, both in terms of the kind of videos it can help create (or create on its own) and in how refined the YouTube algorithm might become, for better or for worse. You have to figure that whatever YouTube evolves into, or is dethroned by, will involve AI.

So, happy birthday, YouTube, and I hope your twenties are fulfilling.