The YouTube Revolution

People watch hundreds of millions of videos every day,

and according to the YouTube Fact Sheet, ten hours of video are uploaded every minute. Wow.

Launched in 2005, YouTube.com has grown to be one of the most visited websites of all time. But can you guess who owns it? Yes, of course! Google! Adding yet another hit to there ever-growing collection of websites. As result of the crazy amount of traffic YouTube has drawn, I wonder, “Why do people spend hours a day, watching random videos?” That question can be answered in many different ways, some of which we’ll not get into.

Not unlike many other websites (and all other media, as well), YouTube has three key purposes. Each one draws a different type of audience. Some videos are more attractive than others (i.e. How To Make A Potato Gun, a helpful guide, might be more popular than Extreme Action Sports Movie, some random kid’s skateboarding video). But the three purposes, or functions, of YouTube have rocketed it to the top of the interweb, as my mother, Andrew Wilkinson, and I call it.

YouTube is to:

1. Entertainment is the chief motive of YouTube. Drawing a plethora of video-trollers out of the woodwork, entertainment can be accounted for as the #1 purpose of online video.
2. Information is in high-demand. Always. Many people come to YouTube as a guide. The hundreds of thousands of How-To videos provide a quick and easy outlet for the incompetent (or not) American (or not) to access information.
3. I totally forgot what the last one was. Oh well!

I’ve turned to YouTube for all two and a half of these reasons. Entertainment? Actually, that one not too much. The only time I used YouTube for that was before I discovered Hulu, the TV’s killer.  Nowadays, in an effort to resist the epidemic of video-addiction, I rarely visit YouTube, despite its helpfulness when assembling a SpringFree™ trampoline. I actually know people who spend the entire day trolling the site, hoping they find that precious video, the video that’s actually interesting. Okay, maybe not entire days, but a long time.

In the spirit of the holiday season, happy viewing, merry Tube-ing, and have a good time!