YouTube Dishes Up Stats, Playlists for Fifth Birthday Bash

by Clint Boulton

YouTube offers this doodle logo for its fifth birthday.

This timeline charts the rapid rise of YouTube, which Google acquired in 2006.

YouTube was organized in 2005, formally launching into beta in May. Hence, the fifth birthday celebration May 17. This infographic was compiled by Website-monitoring.com.

Few will argue Google’s acquisition of YouTube wasn’t the biggest thing that happened to the startup in 2006. YouTube was racking up 100 million video views per day, showing that the Website certainly required the massive data center presence of Google to help serve video to users.

Not among the 2007 highlights is Viacom’s commencement of a $1.1 billion lawsuit against YouTube for copyright infringement.

YouTube launches captions, Insight analytics and pre-roll ads, looking to capitalize on a potentially lucrative market for video ads. That hasn’t really happened yet, but YouTube is trying.

YouTube launches political channels for the elections, topping more than 1 billion page views per day by October. The Website launched to full HD content in November.

Four-plus months into 2010 and with a sharp redesign under its belt, YouTube boasts 2 billion daily downloads. The site also launched its YouTube Rentals service to challenge Amazon and others in renting video content.

These stats show YouTube’s heady growth through the first five years of its life.

How Partners and Advertisers Fare on YouTube There is a lot of promise here, but how much Google is actually making from ads on YouTube is a mystery.

Note the very open, Spartan design of YouTube’s home page in 2005, which has always been core to Google’s mission.

Here is YouTube after the recent refresh in 2010. Note how the very sparse home page has become more cluttered as the site seeks to cram more content to lure users.