Seven years ago, at precisely 8:27 PM Pacific Time, YouTube cofounder Jawed Karim made history.
A 19-second recording of Karim’s musings about elephants probably didn’t seem to hold much significance when it was filmed. But we now know its importance: It is the first ever video uploaded to YouTube.
In order to commemorate the first video’s seven-year anniversary, we’ve collected a few facts and figures about YouTube in its early days and now:
Capacity
In 2006, YouTube would not accept more than 100 megabytes of footage—that’s 30 seconds on a camcorder or ten minutes on an at the time still-new digital video camera.
Today, YouTube users can upload videos up to 10 hours in length.
Users
YouTube was launched in November 2005. By the end of the month, the site already had 200,000 registered users. By mid-2006, it had 20 million unique visitors per month. That same year, Ad Age called YouTube the fastest growing site on the Web.
Today, YouTube has 800 million unique visitors every month.
Traffic
Even in its early days, YouTube was the traffic leader in the online video market. In 2006, users watched 2.5 billion videos in just the month of June.
Now, users watch 4 billion videos every day.
Uploads
In 2006, users uploaded 65,000 videos a day. At the time, most videos were around two minutes in length, which means that about 2,166 hours of video were uploaded per day.
Today, an hour of video is uploaded to YouTube every second.
YouTube has come a long way since Karim’s blurry, home-video-quality recording. We look forward to covering it for years to come.
Photo via YouTube
