YouTube is visited by nearly a quarter of the world’s population, boasting 2 billion monthly active users.

YouTube is an American online video sharing and social media platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. Owned by Google, it is the second most visited website, right after Google itself.

YouTube has more than one billion monthly users who collectively watch more than one billion hours of videos each day. As of May 2019, videos were being uploaded at a rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute.

YouTube has had an unprecedented social impact, influencing popular culture, internet trends, and creating multimillionaire celebrities. Despite all its growth and success, YouTube has been widely criticized. Criticism of YouTube includes the website being used to facilitate the spread of misinformation, copyright issues, routine violations of its users’ privacy, enabling censorship, and endangering child safety and wellbeing.