YouTube
YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen, who were former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in San Bruno, California, it is the second-most-visited website in the world, after Google. In January 2024, YouTube had more than 2.7 billion monthly active users, who collectively watched more than one billion hours of videos every day. As of May 2019, videos were being uploaded to the platform at a rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute, and as of mid-2024, there were approximately 14.8 billion videos in total. Wikipedia
Website: www.youtube.com
Owned by: Google
Owns
Latest news
- Jan 16: Podcast Movement Evolutions will be at SXSW this year; more details have been released about the event including a morning keynote from YouTube, a dedicated recording space for creators, and a roster of leading sponsors.
- Jan 14: YouTube is used by more people in the UK than BBC television, according to some new analysis. The data measured so-called "three-minute" monthly reach: people who have used each platform for at least three minutes a month. However, in a parallel with podcasting figures, people don't use YouTube for long - if you compare a "fifteen-minute" monthly reach, BBC tv still comfortably beats YouTube by 6 million users (and then there's the radio and podcasts to add in).
- Jan 13: YouTube rolled out A/B tests for thumbnails and episode titles (Descript has a blog post about it). "We really have no way to prove these are related, but since trying A/B test, our podcast has +47% more views," says Headliner in its newsletter. (Podnews readers get "buy one get one free")
- Jan 12: As widely predicted, Amy Poehler's Good Hang won the Best Podcast at the Golden Globes. Given the prize by Snoop Dogg, in her acceptance speech she said that her podcast was "an attempt to make a very rough and unkind world fill with a little more love and laughter - and laughing with people, not at them". It's the first time that the Golden Globes have had a podcast category; there were six nominees and a little controversy, with some suggesting the awards don't understand the industry. Good Hang only launched in March 2025; in an interview, Poehler said she was a fan of the medium of podcasting and a huge listener.
- Jan 9: Podtrac released its US rankings for December 2025. Year-on-year comparisons for publishers shows RSS consumption down by -2.3%; YouTube consumption up by +82%.
Data credits: Podnews newsletter, Wikipedia