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YouTube, the online video-sharing platform, announced in 2010 that 2 billion YouTube videos were viewed per day. In 2010, it celebrated five years of existence. The company was created by three employees of PayPal: Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. They developed what would become the world’s leading video-sharing platform. YouTube has made it possible for anyone with a video camera (or a camera, or a cell phone that can shoot video), to post a video on the Internet that can be seen by hundreds of millions of people almost immediately.

YouTube is not without criticism. It relies on its users to highlight videos or content that can be arguably pornographic, that contains copyrighted or trademarked property owned by others, or otherwise contains questionable content that might be deemed defamatory or a breach of YouTube’s terms of service that all who upload must agree to.

Clean Cut Media, a website studying the influences of media and pop culture, states that YouTube is the fourth largest destination on the Internet, and the largest video-sharing site. It has 300 million worldwide visitors per month allowing in excess of 5 billion video streams per month. Every day, close to 3.5 million people visit YouTube. The number of videos posted on YouTube in 2008 was estimated to be 83.4 million, and some sources believe the number to be closer to 150 million in 2010.

The market research company, comScore, states the obvious when it claims that YouTube is the “dominant provider of online video” in the United States. More than 14 billion videos were viewed in May 2010, and 24 hours of new videos are uploaded to YouTube every minute.

YouTube has created its own celebrity culture whereby so-called “ordinary people” become famous for no other reason than having appeared on YouTube. Or, because they shot a YouTube video that becomes popular and goes viral. For example, Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager, Amber Lee Ettinger also known as Obama Girl, Chris Crocker for his sobbing rant: “Leave Britney Alone,” and “Bree” for LonelyGirl15 (a fictional story of teenage girl and the video diary of her life).

YouTube also has an interesting business model, at least for the “pirated” clips you can see on YouTube if you look for them. Pirated clips of movies, TV shows, and other copyrighted productions posted by third parties that you’d think would be pulled off of YouTube by the legal departments of Paramount, 20th Century Fox, or other copyright owners, are often allowed to remain on YouTube as long as YouTube and the copyright holder split the ad revenue generated from the page the clips are on!

Business, nonprofits, “traditional” media, politicians, and interest groups of all types have taken advantage of YouTube’s ability to get video messages to individuals without paying for distribution; in a way, democratizing the “airwaves” in a way television cannot.

Whether you like it or not, YouPorn (the pornographic website modeled on YouTube but which is in no way related to YouTube), is the largest free pornographic site in the world and has been ranked among the top 50 most accessed websites in the world.