The 5th Anniversary of the First Youtube Video

Today is a pinnacle day in the history of YouTube, as April 23, 2010 marks the five-year anniversary of YouTube’s very first uploaded video!

The video isn’t a showstopper, but it is a perfect example of what YouTube is all about. The video, shown below, stars YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego zoo.

YouTube, much like the elephants shown in Jawed’s video, is a mammoth Internet platform. YouTube is the third most visited website on all of the Internet, only behind Google, YouTube’s parent company, and Facebook, the web’s premiere social networking platform.

In the beginning stages of YouTube’s infancy, the site harnessed 25 million views per day in 2006, jumped to 100 million views per day in 2007, and in 2009, the site reached 1 billion video views per day!

The numbers on YouTube’s growth are staggering, if not unimaginable. Over these five years, it has become evident that the Internet is forcefully growing into a dynamic video portal. In 2007, YouTube’s bandwidth usage surpassed the entire bandwidth usage that the Internet as a whole used in the year 2000.

The landscape has changed, and there is no better time for a modern company to make the decision to break into the social media landscape and develop their brand on all of the Internet’s platforms like YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter. Viral marketing is a very valuable tool on today's Internet, and in 2010, five years later, YouTube is the definition of viral.

For more information on YouTube, click here.