It all started on April 23 2005, when a grainy 19-second video of the San Diego Zoo was posted on the platform YouTube by the site’s co-founder Jawed Karim. Twenty years later, and YouTube now boasts that more than 20-billion videos have been uploaded to its platform, arguably still one of the most beloved and influential movers in the digital space and one that has made stars, sparked global conversations and allowed us all to experience both the best and the worst of humanity.
In a birthday celebration presentation last week, YouTube reminded the world of its staying power, announcing that from March 2025 more than 20-million videos are uploaded every day on to the site and last year users posted an average of 100-million comments on videos a day. With smart TVs now becoming the primary means by which users in the US watch YouTube content and users spending an average of 50 minutes a day watching videos, YouTube has not so quietly become the most popular streaming service in the world. Its plans for the future show no sign of slowing down or allowing competitors like Netflix any breathing space. A new refreshed app due to be launched soon will allow viewers to watch multiple channels simultaneously and make navigation and playback better and easier.
While two decades of YouTube may simply be written off as giving us all a few bright moments of cats, standup and adorable babies to provide a brief respite from the high-paced pressure of the digital era, a recent article by Doug Most in the Boston University online magazine reminds us that the site has also had a darker influence on shaping our current social and political climate thanks to its unfiltered access to “dangerous disinformation about medicine, mental health, crime and politics, to name only a few subjects”.
For every video that provides helpful do-it-yourself guidance to frustrating tasks like breaking the lock on your suitcase, there are numerous videos that spread conspiracy theories about vaccines or dangerous untested alternative medical treatments that are harmful rather than useful.
For every seemingly harmless Sean Evans — the host of viral phenomenon talk show Hot Ones — there are hundreds of Joe Rogans, Russell Brands, Andrew Tates and their copycat acolytes whose hot takes have had negative and far-reaching consequences in the real world.
YouTube’s embrace of digital democracy may mean that the barriers to creating content have been pretty much eliminated for ordinary people who want to make their voices heard but it can become a problem when, as Most points out, “the information on the platform is often not vetted and this exposes people to misinformation”. That danger is only aggravated by the platform’s recommendation algorithm, which bases its picks on videos you’ve already watched, so if you’ve watched a video full of lies, half-truths and untested misinformation, your next recommended watch might be full of the same, even though you didn’t ask it to be.
There’s also the bigger worry of what the bite-sized attention span demands of YouTube’s content have done to our brains. Over time, consumption of millions of video clips may “erode young people’s ability to sustain focus, regulate emotions and develop a stable sense of self”. It may also ultimately lead to a preference for processing the world through “immediate images rather than through symbolic systems like language, potentially weakening capacities for complex verbal reasoning, critical dialogue, and nuanced understanding of others”.
But it’s not all doom and gloom because, with 2-billion users and a global reach that’s far beyond any of its streaming peers, YouTube can still become a space for talented people to break through without the interference of gatekeepers as has been the case for artists, who are now indelibly part of our popular culture. Without YouTube there may not have been a Justin Bieber, an Ed Sheeran or the phenomenon of Taylor Swift and, while I could live in a world without any of them, their use of the platform as a means for supercharging their careers has served as an inspiration for millions of other artists of arguably better quality.
Though it may still have, like any 20-year-old, many kinks to work out, YouTube has certainly proved itself to be an undeniable part of our world, and it’s also made some eye-watering profits in its relatively short existence. In 2006, when Google purchased the platform, it paid $1.65bn. Today, according to a 2024 Bloomberg estimate, it’s worth $445bn. That’s the kind of return that would make any investor wish for a time machine.
It’s also created jobs for about 50-million people who make their living as content creators, many of whom make millions of dollars a year for themselves and the platform, which has become the foremost place for advertisers to get their products seen.
The divide between television and YouTube used to be easy to define but now, as the company’s CEO Neal Mohan, declared in February, “YouTube is television”, television is YouTube, and the future is as blurred as that original, grainy, 19-second San Diego Zoo video from 2005.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.