There are now a billion active users of YouTube — monthly. This was revealed in an event by YouTube celebrating the remarkable feat, yesterday. It comes five months after Facebook hit a billion users — monthly, and 7 years after Google bought YouTube for $1.76 billion.
It seals YouTube’s top spot among leading websites worldwide, after Google and Facebook. YouTube says people are now visiting its online video site “each month to watch everything from zany clips of cute kittens to sobering scenes of social unrest around the world.”
There are several million YouTube Channels — or user accounts archiving videos from users. YouTube’s more than a billion dollar annual revenue, comes from ads, and it is usually shared with high-content, high audience channels.
YouTube was founded in February 2005, by former Paypal employees Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. YouTube had 50 million users in 2006, when Google bought it from them.
