Youtube

YouTube

YouTube is a website created in 2005 whose function is to allow users to upload and share videos, something that was quite complicated before the appearance of this website. It provides very different kind of videos, such as personal, music, movie clips and almost whatever considered as a video.This original and innovative idea and its easy format have sited YouTube as one of the most famous websites between young people mainly, buteverybody knows it.

History

YouTube was founded in February 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, three ex employees of PayPal. The success was almost immediate and this made that many publicity companies gave economic support. In October 2006, YouTube was bought by Google Inc for 1.65 billion dollars and it became a subsidiary of Google. Its popularity has increased so much that it has become the fourth most visited website after Google, Yahoo! and Facebook.

Social Impact

The most important key of the success of YouTube is that it is a website that offers something that was not available for everybody and that Internet surfers were demanding. With this tool, a common user is able to upload a personal video to share with other people and it is getting so important that famous social networking sites, such as Facebook, Twitter or Tuenti, allow uploading directly YouTube videos. Even other platforms of the Internet are common users of YouTube material. This is the case of many forums, chats and blogs.

Criticism

The most controversial fact about YouTube is that a lot if copyrighted material is uploaded on YouTube, in spite of the prohibition of the websites. The following message is shown before the uploading of a video:

“Do not upload any TV shows, music videos, music concerts or commercials without permission unless they consist entirely of content you created yourself. The Copyright Tips page and the Community Guidelines can help you determine whether your video infringes someone else's copyright.”

However, it is not rare to find videos of unauthorized music concerts, films.

Moreover, there are many criticisms about the existence of inappropriate videos, such as violence, porn or insulting videos.

Bibliography:

www.youtube.com

www.wikipedia.org