Google and YouTube

Google is my favourite search engine. No surprise there.

‘Google dominates the search engine market with a 91.9% share as at January 2022. It’s ahead of Bing at 2.88%, Yahoo! with 1.51%, Yandex (Russian) owning 1.27% and Baidu (Chinese) at 1.16%[1].’

I like Google. No question or query is too complicated, trite or unique. I can almost always find answers and data to just about anything from the latest news, recipes, entertainment to sports. My preference was reaffirmed when I bought my new mobile phone. Bar a hardcopy mobile phone manual, Google was my go-to. Yes, I could have downloaded the manual for my reference. But I didn’t want nor was I interested in every function the phone offered. Mine was on a need-for basis. Each time I hit an impasse, I turned to Google.

I started the search with specific questions to problems with the Samsung A34. Which by way was only launched in March. Even before I could finish typing my questions, it gave me the answers that I needed. When I didn’t wholly understand the answers, I asked YouTube for a demo. While it didn’t solve all my problems, the search/information and video/visual combo helped me transition to my new phone without too much trouble.

Google and YouTube. The duo has been my back-up since my original Denise Austin exercise DVDs, which my husband bought on Amazon, stopped working on my DVD player. On YouTube, there’s a wide selection of cardio and dance workouts to choose from including the titles of my no-longer working Denise Austin videos. These two platforms were/are my reference for biscuit recipes and the occasional cake that I used to bake. And, to cook sweet rice to celebrate Indian religious festivals with my mum. I don’t remember recipes. YouTube readily assists with the ingredients and steps to follow from a choice of professional and home cooks/chefs. Google is also my translator, my currency and measurements convertor, my calculator, my distance and location finder and my flight monitor. Plus, my online shopping and holiday bookings facilitator.

Hence, it’s no wonder that ‘Google has about 3.8 million searches per minute globally. It can handle 3 billion pages daily. It operates in 80 languages worldwide. It offers exceptionally high-quality results for about 15% of new searches daily. It’s able to present each result within a tenth of a second. Thanks to its technical infrastructure and team of experts [2].

It’s also no wonder that YouTube is the biggest video-sharing platform and the second-biggest social media platform in the world, with over 2.68 billion users as of 2023. Every day, users consume 1 billion hours of videos on YouTube. Every day, over 122 million people visit YouTube via its Website and Apps[3].

I knew this. Google’s parent company is Alphabet. Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006. The tech giant had a jaw dropping market capitalization of $1.59 trillion as at May, 2023[4].

I didn’t know this. YouTube was created in 2004 by three former PayPal employees, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. Chad Hurley officially registered the trademark, logo, and domain for YouTube as a dating site on Valentine’s Day in 2004. The concept didn’t work. Then, the trio devised the idea of allowing users to upload videos. Some bumps along the way, and the rest is history.

At the time, Google also had its own video service, Google Video, which wasn’t doing as well as expected. Google realised YouTube’s potential, and that’s why/how it became Google’s official video uploading site. Despite being owned by Google, YouTube has retained its brand identity.

Apparently, ‘the three co-founders – all became multi-millionaires, making probably $300 million each for Chen and Hurley and around $66 million for Karim, who was already out.[5]

YouTube was a sound investment. Some interesting facts [6].

YouTube earned an estimated $35 billion in annual revenue until the first half of 2022.

85% of its earnings came from Ad Sales. The balance 15% from user subscriptions on YouTube Premium.

YouTube is an excellent platform for content creators like make-up artists, travel vloggers, bloggers and gamers to earn money from their videos.

Ad Sales places targeted ads on video content. Content creators get a hefty 45% of the revenue from those ads.

In 2021, YouTube content creators were paid over $15.9 billion.

The top 10 highest paid YouTube stars generated $300 million in annual earnings.

Mr. Beast was number 1. With earnings about $27 million, and over 100 million current subscribers. I had to Google/YouTube Mr. Beast. Names I recognised amongst the top ten most subscribed were Justin Bieber (4), Ed Sheeren (7), and Taylor Swift (9) as of Dec, 2022.