Youtube Phenomenon

If you browse the web, you'll come across many websites that has one or more video clips embedded in it. News websites such as BBC and CNN fall in this category. But, what about a website that has only video clips and nothing else? This is exactly what the Youtube Phenomenon is all about. To those who have not heard about Youtube, it is a video sharing website where one could upload, share, and watch video clips - Youtube videos - for free. It is owned by Google. 

Here is a bit history of what all went behind in the making of Youtube.com. Little had the three former PayPal employees - Chad Hurley,
Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen - anticipated about the growth and fame Youtube would achieve in less than one year since its inception, when they first planned such a video sharing website. An out-of-the box idea, Youtube.com was launched as an unknown new website on February 15, 2005 with virtually no promotion. The website with its full features become operational few month later; the first preview of the website was offered in May 2005 and its official debut in November the same year. As it had been with many great path breaking projects in the past, the incubation days of Youtube took place in a modest garage in California, much like its present owner's - Google - beginnings, who started their journey from a leased space in a Menlo Park garage in 1998. 

The beginnings of Youtube was pretty modest and its creators more than once at least went through a cash crunch as the visitors to the website grew and the need for better infrastructure and technology became inevitable. Irony it may be that the first helping hand they got which had pulled them out of the financial crisis was that of the venture capital firm Sequoia, the very same firm that had funded Google in its early years. Sequoia invested $3.5 million initially in Youtube, the stake which they upped to $8 million few months later, realizing the vast potential Youtube.com has in the fast growing world of infotainment in the near future. 

Another development that had immensely helped catapulting Youtube into the forefront of online entertainment industry came from rather unexpected quarters, in the form of new software tool - the Flash Player 8 by Macromedia - that enabled people to view Youtube videos directly from their web browsers without having to download it into their PCs and view it with the help of third party software programs such as Windows Media Player or RealOne Player. In fact, it not only eliminated the need to view downloaded files in third party tools, but also provided a far improved video quality than its predecessor, Flash Player 7. Had it not been for the new Flash Player, the Flash Player 8, it is unlikely that Youtube.com would have taken off this fast, in such a short span of time. 

As of today, Youtube.com, under the umbrella of Google, is the fastest growing video website in the globe and the 10th most popular amongst all websites in the cyberspace, according to the latest Alexa ratings. Nearly 100 million video clips from Youtube are seen by netizens daily and around 65,000 new Youtube videos are added every day into the database. The number of netizens visiting Youtube every month is thought to be anywhere near 20 million. No wonder, Youtube.com is described not as a website, but as a phenomenon by market experts.