YouTube

YouTube is a video hosting and sharing platform. Founded in 2005 by former PayPal employees and bought by Google in 2006, YouTube is now home to over 1 billion users and holds all varieties of user-created videos and corporate media. YouTube has an easy to use interface to find and share all kinds of different videos. The website offers videos of all kinds and genres for free, as well as a paid subscription to get access to official higher quality videos and series’. Creating a channel and uploading videos is simple, however due to the sheer quantity of videos present on the platform it is difficult to get discovered and have people view your content. This makes is necessary to share or link your videos outside of YouTube itself. Depending on what kind of videos you produce, the comments that the user base of the website can leave are likely to not be constructive. The video and channel managers, labeled the “Creator’s Studio,” is not always clear on what everything does and is sometimes difficult to navigate. The algorithm that handles copyright enforcement can also be an issue, sometimes flagging your videos for various reasons, and causing you to have to contest the claim. If you manage to gather a following for your videos, you can monetize your videos to start making money from your viewers watching and clicking ads. This is not very useful if you don’t have a large amount of views per video and can cause you to pay more than you are paying to have access to AdSense if you have a small amount of views. However, if you have a large following, the amount of revenue can gather up quickly. Overall YouTube is an excellent platform for uploading and finding videos of any type or genre you could think of, while getting your own content discovered can be difficult. Regardless, YouTube is a staple of the internet and has apps on most modern devices, making accessing the website from any device easy.