Google has released the top 10 most viewed videos and music videos in Ireland to mark the 10th birthday of YouTube going live, initially as a beta test, in May 2005.
A decade ago Chad Hurley, Steven Chen and Jawed Karim started YouTube. The legend is that they just wanted to share videos from a dinner party they had, but the real truth is that the inspiration first came from Janet Jackson’s infamous role in the 2004 Super Bowl.
The first video shared on YouTubewas entitled Me At the Zoo. The video showed Karim talking about elephants and was a mere 20 seconds long. It didn’t appear on the site until December that year.
However, 10 years ago this month, the first public beta test of YouTube began, six months before the official launch in November 2005. And the rest is history. By 2013 YouTube passed 1bn unique users a month and 300 hours of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute, compared with 24 hours per minute in 2013.
In October 2006 Google announced that it had acquired YouTube for US$1.65bn in Google stock.
The most-viewed video of all time on YouTube is the Gagnam Style music video, which still gets 1m views per day.
The most viewed non-music video of all time is Charlie Bit My Finger (Again), with more than 800m views.
Most-viewed YouTube videos in Ireland
The top 10 most viewed videos of all time in Ireland, listed from 1 to 10, are:
Most-viewed YouTube music videos in Ireland
And the 10 most-viewed YouTube music videos in Ireland, ordered from 1 to 10, are:
YouTube image at top via Shutterstock
