Rayburn said that even though YouTube is immensely popular around the world, it is not clear if it has a real business model. It has faced bans in some countries, notably for the distribution of a film about Muhammad which offended some Muslims, and has faced criticism for being used to distribute unauthorized copyrighted content. YouTube played a key role in the Arab Spring uprisings and other political movements. "Everyone in the world knows YouTube, even my mom," said Dan Rayburn, analyst at Frost and Sullivan who also writes a blog about streaming media.
But analysts and others were talking about the milestone. Google is reserving its 10-year anniversary celebration for May 10, marking the day the site went public, a spokesman told AFP. Some 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute, and "every day people watch hundreds of millions of hours on YouTube and generate billions of views," according to the YouTube statistics page. The first video uploaded April 23, 2005-an 18-second clip of co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo-offered little indication the service would become the leader in Internet video and a key part of the Google empire.Ī decade later, YouTube has more than one billion users, with localized service in 75 countries and 61 languages.