In May 2024, YouTube introduced Playables, a set of around 75 free-to-play games that can be played on the platform. Starting with the Oculus Quest, the app was updated for compatibility with mixed-reality passthrough modes on VR headsets. In November 2016, YouTube released YouTube VR, a dedicated version with an interface for VR devices, for Google’s Daydream mobile VR platform on Android.

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On May 25, 2023, YouTube announced that they would be shutting down this feature on June 26, 2023. On October 15, 2024, the platform officially extended the length of shorts to 3 minutes. In May 2022, Google announced that they would be shutting down YouTube Go in August 2022. On February 1, 2018, it was rolled out in 130 countries worldwide, including Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, and Iraq.

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On October 9, 2006, Google announced that they had acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock. The choice of the name youtube.com led to problems for a similarly named website, utube.com. Despite eventually being taken down, these duplicate uploads of the skit helped popularize YouTube’s reach and led to the upload of more third-party content. Besides helping to bolster ratings and long-term viewership for Saturday Night Live, “Lazy Sunday”‘s status as an early viral video helped establish YouTube as an important website. YouTube was not the first video-sharing site on the Internet; Vimeo was founded in November 2004, though that site remained a side project of its developers from CollegeHumor.
YouTube, a video sharing platform, has faced various criticisms over the years, particularly regarding content moderation, offensive content, and monetization. YouTube VR allows for access to all YouTube-hosted videos, but particularly supports headset access for 360° and 180°-degree video (both in 2D and stereoscopic 3D). It also allowed users to preview videos, share downloaded videos through Bluetooth, and offered more options for mobile data control and video resolution. In September 2016, YouTube Go was announced, as an Android app created for making YouTube easier to access on mobile devices in emerging markets. On February 28, 2017, in a press announcement held at YouTube Space Los Angeles, YouTube announced YouTube TV, an over-the-top MVPD-style subscription service that would be available for United States customers at a price of US$65 per month. In March 2021, Google announced plans to gradually deprecate the Google Play Movies & TV app, and eventually migrate all users to the YouTube app’s Movies & TV store to view, rent and purchase movies and TV shows (first affecting Roku, Samsung, LG, and Vizio smart TV users on July 15).
A Pew Research Center study reported the development of “visual journalism”, in which citizen eyewitnesses and established news organizations share in content creation. By early 2013, Billboard had announced that it was factoring YouTube streaming data into calculation of the Billboard Hot 100 and related genre charts. Videos of the 2.5% of artists categorized as “mega”, “mainstream” and “mid-sized” received 90.3% of the relevant views on YouTube and Vevo in that year.
Indie creators have built grassroots followings numbering in the thousands at very little cost or effort, while mass retail and radio promotion proved problematic. As of 2018update, public access to YouTube is blocked by China, North Korea, Iran, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Eritrea, Sudan and South Sudan mostly due to freedom of speech laws. Businesses, schools, government agencies, and other private institutions often block social media sites, including YouTube, due to its bandwidth limitations and the site’s potential for distraction.
In the 2011 case of Smith v. Summit Entertainment LLC, professional singer Matt Smith sued Summit Entertainment for the wrongful use of copyright takedown notices on YouTube. In August 2008, a US court ruled in Lenz v. Universal Music Corp. that copyright holders cannot order the removal of an online file without first determining whether the posting reflected fair use of the material. Any successful complaint about copyright infringement results in a YouTube copyright strike. Despite this advice, many unauthorized clips of copyrighted material remain on YouTube. On onedun August 5, 2015, YouTube patched the formerly notorious behavior which caused a video’s view count to freeze at “301” (later “301+”) until the actual count was verified to prevent view count fraud. YouTube has been led by a CEO since its founding in 2005, beginning with Chad Hurley, who led the company until 2010.
Under YouTube’s changes to its recommendation engine, the most-recommended channel evolved from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (2016) to Fox News (2019). Senate introduced a resolution condemning Joseph Kony 16 days after the “Kony 2012” video was posted to YouTube, with resolution co-sponsor Senator Lindsey Graham remarking that the video “will do more to lead to (Kony’s) demise than all other action combined.” YouTube has enabled people to more directly engage with government, such as in the CNN/YouTube presidential debates (2007) in which ordinary people submitted questions to U.S. presidential candidates via YouTube video, with a techPresident co-founder saying that Internet video was changing the political landscape. The study also concluded that YouTube was becoming an important platform by which people acquire news.

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• That year, the company again changed its interface and at the same time, introduced a new logo with a darker shade of red.
• In response to EU officials requesting that such services reduce bandwidth to make sure medical entities had sufficient bandwidth to share information, YouTube and Netflix said they would reduce streaming quality for at least thirty days as to cut bandwidth use of their services by 25% to comply with the EU’s request.
• They created posts on Craigslist asking attractive women to upload videos of themselves to YouTube in exchange for a $100 reward.
• In April 2010, Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” became the most-viewed video, becoming the first video to reach 200 million views on May 9, 2010.
• In March 2017, the government of the United Kingdom pulled its advertising campaigns from YouTube, after reports that its ads had appeared on videos containing extremist content.
• YouTube has faced numerous challenges and criticisms in its attempts to deal with copyright, including the site’s first viral video, Lazy Sunday, which had to be taken down, due to copyright concerns.
• Around the same time, YouTube started using server-side ad injection, which allows the platform to inject the ads directly into the video, instead of having the ad as a separate file which can be blocked.

In 2013, YouTube teamed up with satirical newspaper company The Onion to claim in an uploaded video that the video-sharing website was launched as a contest which had finally come to an end, and would shut down for ten years before being re-launched in 2023, featuring only the winning video. In October 2024, a Russian court fined Google 2 undecillion rubles (equivalent to US$20 decillion) for restricting Russian state media channels on YouTube. Shortly after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, YouTube removed all channels funded by the Russian state.

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• YouTube has an estimated 14.8 billion videos with about 4% of those never having a view.
• The decision of Alphabet to bring back YouTube creators who engaged in misinformation was criticized for prioritizing “free expression” over “facts”.
• On November 11, 2021, after testing out this change in March of the same year, YouTube announced it would start hiding dislike counts on videos, making them invisible to viewers.
• In September 2016, YouTube Go was announced, as an Android app created for making YouTube easier to access on mobile devices in emerging markets.
• Starting in June 2024, Google Chrome announced that it would be replacing Manifest V2 in favor of Manifest V3, effectively killing support for most ad-blockers.
• In 2021, two accounts linked to RT DE, the German channel of the Russian state-owned RT network, were removed for breaching YouTube’s policies relating to COVID-19.

Like TikTok, it gives users access to built-in creative tools, including the possibility of adding licensed music to their videos. In May 2013, Nintendo began enforcing its copyright ownership and claiming the advertising revenue from video creators who posted screenshots of its games. The majority of YouTube’s advertising revenue goes to the publishers and video producers who hold the rights to their videos; the company retains 45% of the ad revenue.

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That year, the company simplified its interface to increase the time users would spend on the site. Unofficial uploads of the skit to YouTube drew in more than five million collective views by February 2006 before they were removed when NBCUniversal requested it two months later based on copyright concerns. Difficulty in finding enough dating videos led to a change of plans, with the site’s founders deciding to accept uploads of any video. They created posts on Craigslist asking attractive women to upload videos of themselves to YouTube in exchange for a $100 reward.
In 2016, YouTube introduced an option to watch every video on the platform in 360-degree mode with Snoop Dogg. The next year, YouTube added a music button to the video bar that played samples from “Sandstorm” by Darude. A video of two presenters announcing the nominated videos streamed live for 12 hours.
YouTube began offering free-to-view movie titles to its users in November 2018; selections of new movies are added and others removed, unannounced each month. YouTube Movies & TV is a video on demand (VOD) service that offers movies and television shows for purchase or rental, depending on availability, along with a selection of movies (encompassing between 100 and 500 titles overall) that are free to stream, with interspersed ad breaks. On May 22, 2018, the music streaming platform named “YouTube Music” was launched for people who mostly listen to music on YouTube. As of September 2019, the app is available in 69 countries, including Hong Kong and Macau, and one province. YouTube Kids is an American children’s video app developed by YouTube, a subsidiary of Google. YouTube Premium (formerly Music Key and YouTube Red) is YouTube’s premium subscription service.

YouTube released a mobile app known as YouTube Kids in 2015, which was designed to provide an experience optimized for children. Through this period, YouTube tried several new ways to generate revenue beyond advertisements. YouTube officially launched the “polymer” redesign of its user interfaces based on Material Design language as its default, as well as a redesigned logo that is built around the service’s play button emblem in August 2017. The lawsuit was filed due to alleged copyright infringement of Viacom’s material by YouTube. That year, the company again changed its interface and at the same time, introduced a new logo with a darker shade of red. It was at this time that YouTube adopted the slogan “Broadcast Yourself”.The company experienced rapid growth.
The company stated the decision was in response to experiments which confirmed that smaller YouTube creators were more likely to be targeted in dislike brigading and harassment. On April 9, 2025, YouTube expressed support for the NO FAKES Act of 2025, introduced by Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) and Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and announced an expansion of its pilot program that is designed to identify content generated by AI. On July 30, 2025, amid the implementation of the Online Safety Act 2023 in the United Kingdom, Google announced that it would begin to enforce “age assurance” policies for selected users in the United States as a trial. Around the same time, YouTube started using server-side ad injection, which allows the platform to inject the ads directly into the video, instead of having the ad as a separate file which can be blocked. In April 2024, YouTube announced it would be “strengthening our enforcement on third-party apps that violate YouTube’s Terms of Service, specifically ad-blocking apps”. Users of ad blockers may be given a pop-up warning saying “Video player will be blocked after 3 videos”.
As part of YouTube Music, Universal and YouTube signed an agreement in 2017, which was followed by separate agreements other major labels, which gave the company the right to advertising revenue when its music was played on YouTube. In 2022, YouTube launched an experiment where the company would show users who watched longer videos on TVs a long chain of short unskippable adverts, intending to consolidate all ads into the beginning of a video. While some users praised the move as a way to discourage trolls, others felt that hiding dislikes would make it harder for viewers to recognize clickbait or unhelpful videos and that other features already existed for creators to limit bullying. It features a simplified user interface, curated selections of channels featuring age-appropriate content, and parental control features. YouTube also released YouTube Music, a third app oriented towards streaming and discovering the music content hosted on the YouTube platform. In 2013, YouTube launched a pilot program for content providers to offer premium, subscription-based channels.