WASHINGTON: Ten years after its launch, YouTube has become a household name for online video but faces an array of rivals in the market and lingering questions about its business model.

The first video uploaded April 23, 2005 — an 18-second clip of co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo — offered little indication the service would become the leader in Internet video and a key part of the Google empire.

A decade later, YouTube has more than one billion users, with localised service in 75 countries and 61 languages.

Some 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and “every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views,” according to the YouTube statistics page.

Google is reserving its 10-year anniversary celebration for May 10, marking the day the site went public, a spokesman said. But analysts and others were talking about the milestone.

“Everyone in the world knows YouTube, even my mom,” said Dan Rayburn, analyst at Frost and Sullivan who also writes a blog about streaming media.

YouTube played a key role in the Arab Spring uprisings and other political movements.

Published in Dawn, April 24th, 2015

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