YouTube Celebrates its Fifth Birthday This Week

Almost two billion videos are now viewed each and every day on YouTube! In fact, the site has grown to become a new kind of search engine, a rival for its owner Google and one of the web's top content publishers.

I bet plenty of us out there now turn to YouTube rather than Google when looking for information online. Over the last five years, YouTube has become a source of information that's just as rich as any traditional search engine, and primarily provides answers to all our questions in the form of user-uploaded videos. So to describe YouTube as a mere database of 'funny video clips' is to do it a serious injustice, as YouTube is much more than that: it's the search engine of choice for a great many Internet users.

The YouTube blog boasts the site's audience is 'nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major U.S. television networks combined'. However, users currently stay on the site for an average of 15 minutes per day, whereas the average American family spends around five hours per day in front of the TV.

To celebrate its fifth birthday, YouTube has launched a special Five Year Channel with videos telling the history of the site via individual YouTube stories from users around the world. It also features an interactive video timeline, charting YouTube's history in the site's favourite form of media.

Our favourite video is this one (below), showing the humble beginnings of the YouTube site.

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