YouTube became so ubiquitous so quickly that it’s hard to remember a time when it didn’t exist, but that actually wasn’t all that long ago. Before April of 2005, YouTube was a name known by only those who had created and those few who were part of the then-private video sharing site. It didn’t stay that way for long.
In honor of its 10-year anniversary, YouTube is celebrating for nearly a month – 26 days to be exact. Why 26? Because the company is sharing a video for every letter of the alphabet, from A to Z.
“YouTube is a portrait of our global culture, seen through the lenses and perspectives of people around the world. It is a portrait built by a creative community of bold and fearless individuals,” reads the blog post announcing the celebration. “Built by comedians, gamers, activists, artists, performers, teachers, and pranksters. Built with cats and rainbows and blenders and ninjas and unicorns. It was built on the silly. It was built on the profound. It was built by you.”
While the first content shared on YouTube was a relatively uninteresting video of an elephant, the company has come a long way since that inauspicious start. Since its launch, YouTube has consistently been supporting higher quality videos and adding feature after feature.
Last month alone, YouTube brought two new features to the site. Early in March, the company added support for 360-degree videos, and later in the month, we saw the first 4K video content at 60 frames per second on the site.
The sheer amount of content on the site is staggering: 300 hours of video are uploaded to the site every minute. Who knows what the future will bring, but it will surely be interesting.
If you want to follow the celebration across all 26 letters of the alphabet, you can keep track of the videos as they’re released on the YouTube Trends Blog.
