by Sergio Rodriguez

This image was taken from Youtube.com [1]

YouTube Headquarters

901 Cherry Avenue

Second Floor

San Bruno, CA 94066

Phone: (650) 253-0000

Fax: (650) 253-0001

www.Youtube.com

Key Executives [2]

Ms. Susan D. Wojcicki- Chief Executive Officer

Ms. Julie Supan- Senior Director of Marketing

hunter-walk-homebrew-vc*304xx375-250-8-0

Mr. Hunter Walk- Head of Product

Mr. Kevin Donahue- Vice President of Content

Ms. Suzie Reider- Chief Marketing Officer

What is YouTube?

Created in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, YouTube is a media sharing website that allows for people to connect, discover, watch, and share user created original videos.[3] It allows for people to connect through commentary feedback as well as features a like and dislike system.

This is a screenshot of the website.

Users are able to search videos from a list of different categories such as YouTube Original Channels, beauty, comedy, entertainment, film, music and more. These lists continue to grow as more people sign up, create accounts and post videos.[4]

Since it’s release, the company has worked really hard to expand the amount of devices that support it through applications. The YouTube application is available on many of today’s electronics like Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and various mobile platforms like tablets.[5]

Screenshot of YouTube Application [5]

YouTube is generally a free site, but as of November 12, 2014, they introduced a new music streaming service called “YouTube Music Key.” With this service, subscribers are able to listen to music and watch videos free of ads both online and offline. People who subscribe early on will get to pay the lower price of $7.99 a month, while those who wait for the expansion of the service; which will take place in the next year, will have to pay $9.99 a month.[6]

Financials

YouTube, LLC is a subsidiary of Google, Inc. and because of this, it is difficult to get exact numbers when it comes to how much revenue the company makes. Therefore, most of the revenue about to be listed is estimated from Forbes.

According to Forbes, YouTube continues to significantly increase its revenue year after year. In 2011, the company’s revenue was $2 billion and increased 8.5 percent to $3.70 billion in 2012. In 2013, revenue increased again 11.1 percent to $5.60 billion.[7]

YouTube has over 1 billion active subscribers a day and the number continues to grow everyday, especially in other countries. The most popular YouTube channel has over 82 million subscribers.[8]

Since Google does not say how much of its profits come from, analysts estimate that YouTube is worth somewhere between $26 billion and $40 billion. Google itself is worth around $400 billion as a company.

The Company

YouTube owes its vastly huge success to the power of advertisement. Working with huge companies to provide advertisement for them to bring to the audience contributes heavily to the revenue of YouTube. Though the company splits about half of its profits with the owners of the content, they still managed to reel in about $2.8 billion this year from ad revenues; which is about a 48 percent increase from the previous year. In 2015, according to a report, the revenue will increase again to around $3.5 billion.[9]

History

The domain name YouTube.com was created in 2005 by three former PayPal employees by the name of Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. It was inspired by the fact that the creators were not able to locate videos of the Janet Jackson super bowl incident and the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami. A beta version of the website went up in May of 2005 and six months later it officially launched thanks to a $3.5 million investment from Sequoia Capital and from there it grew exponentially.[10]

Videos were already getting about 100,000 daily views in 2006 and because of this it caught the attention of Google and it was bought out by them for $1.65 billion in October 2006.

In 2007 after launching their Partner Program, people were able to make money based off their viral videos and in 2008; some of them started making six figure incomes. It was also around this time that Google decided to make money by rolling out ads that played on videos.

Starting in 2009, the company became mainstream to the point that the government opened up YouTube channels. Even the Vatican opened an account on the site. This is also when the company teamed up with Vivendi to create Vevo, a music video service. Organizations began to use it as well, starting with columnist Dan Savage who launched the “It Gets Better” project. The company keeps expanding.[11]

The “It Gets Better” Project

The Competition

Over the years, YouTube has grown to become the prominent video sharing website for a variety of people as well as organizations, and when one thing succeeds, others follow in its footsteps to achieve the same. As time passed, many other video sharing websites have emerged as competition for the company. Some of the competitors include Vimeo and Dailymotion. Vimeo, its closest competitor, was founded in 2004 and in 2013; it had only 400,000 paying subscribers and had a revenue of $40 million.[12] Youtube remains number 1 for video sharing.

What’s the future looking like?

Since becoming Chief Executive Officer of YouTube back in Februrary of 2014, Susan D. Wojcick has had plans of expanding the capabilities of the company to try and handle more than it can and take things to a new level. She has already made huge improvements to the way the site runs and its usability as well as contributed to the growth of the company revenue. Right Wojcick has two main focuses. The first is to improve its ability for user to communicate on a global level. The second focus is the growth of its business opportunities.[13]

Aside from the business aspect of the company’s growth, Wojcick is also trying to help the creators of the content develop, promote and grow as well. YouTube personalities are well known by the people who watch them but not to other people, especially those around the world. In order to promote these YouTube personalities, she plans on turning the website into something more that resembles television by actively developing and promoting their content so that they will be able to receive more recognition.

Google is investing more money to these stars to create more high quality programming for the site, but this time with a different approach. Before, the company tried to get outside celebrities to join and make them more like television but that failed. It then turned to the people that were already famous within the site. With this, it’ll also help the stars remain on YouTube instead of leaving elsewhere. Some of these stars include: Bethany Mota, a fashion star, Troye Sivan, a singer and YouTube personality and Michelle Phan, a make-up artist.[14]