순둥이와백작부인네집

YouTube

http://www.youtube.com

YouTube 본사건물 겉모습은 화려하지 않다!

유튜브(YouTube)는 무료 동영상 공유 사이트로, 사용자가 영상 클립을 업로드하거나, 보거나, 공유할 수 있다. 2005년 2월에 페이팔 직원이었던 채드 헐리(Chad Meredith Hurley, 현 유튜브 CEO), 스티브 첸(Steve Shih Chen), 자웨드 카림(Jawed Karim, 퇴사)이 공동으로 창립하였다. 사이트 콘텐츠의 대부분은 영화와 텔레비전 클립, 뮤직 비디오이고 아마추어들이 만든 것도 있다. 2006년 10월에 구글은 유튜브를 주식 교환을 통해 16억 5천만 달러에 인수하기로 결정하였다.

구글은 2007년 6월 19일 프랑스 파리에서 열린 ‘구글 프레스데이 2007’ 행사에서 국가별 현지화 서비스를 시작한다고 발표하고, 먼저 네덜란드, 브라질, 프랑스, 폴란드, 아일랜드, 이탈리아, 일본, 스페인, 영국 사용자를 위한 페이지를 공개했다.

한국어 서비스는 2008년 1월 23일에 시작했다.

기술 사항

영상 포맷

유튜브의 영상 재생 기술은 매크로미디어의 어도비 플래시 플레이어 7을 기반으로 한다. 또한 소렌슨 스파크의 H.263 영상 코덱을 기반으로 한다. 이러한 기술들을 바탕으로, 웹 브라우저 플러그인이나 코덱을 일일이 내려 받아 설치해야 했던 이전의 영상 재생 기술(윈도 미디어 플레이어, 퀵타임, 리얼플레이어 등)과 견주어 보아도 꽤 쓸만하고 영상 재생 품질이 그렇게 많이 떨어지지 않는다. 플래시도 플러그인이 필요하긴 하지만 크게 문제되지 않는 것으로 보인다. 왜냐하면 플래시 7 플러그인은 현재 약 90%의 온라인 컴퓨터에 설치되어 있는 것으로 알려져 있기 때문이다. 동영상은 gnash 또는 VLC 미디어 플레이어 등에서도 재생할 수 있다. 화소 크기는 320x240이며, 1초에 25 프레임으로 재생된다. 최대 데이터 레이트는 초당 300kbit이다.

유튜브는 사용자가 업로드한 영상을 플래시 동영상(.FLV, 어도비 플래시 동영상) 형식으로 변환한다. 파일로부터 확장자가 제거된다. (확장자는 TrID 등을 이용하여 다시 볼 수 있다.) 이 파일들은 복잡한 이름을 가진 서브도메인에 저장된다. 이 때문에 영상을 리핑하기가 쉽지 않다.

유튜브는 윈도 미디어 비디오(.WMV), 오디오 비디오 인터리브(.AVI), MPEG, MPEG-4 파트 14(.MP4) 포맷들을 업로드할 수 있다.

동영상은 창 모드 또는 전체 화면 모드 가운데 하나를 골라서 볼 수 있다; 영상을 다시 불러오지 않고도 두 개의 방식을 바꾸어가며 쓸 수 있다. 어도비 시스템즈의 플래시 플레이어 9의 기능 덕분이다.

오디오 포맷

유튜브 파일은 MP3 오디오 스트림 하나를 포함한다. 기본적으로 초당 65kbit 레이트에 22050 Hz, 모노로 인코딩된다. 하지만 맥 오에스 그래픽 사용자 인터페이스나 상용 리바 FLV 인코더 등을 이용하여 사용자가 미리 FLV로 직접 변환해 놓으면, 스테레오 오디오 트랙을 넣을 수 있다.

와이드스크린과 HD 영상

2008년 11월 말, 유튜브는 모든 비디오의 가로세로 비율을 4:3에서 16:9로 전환했다. 따라서 4:3 영상도 필러박스(pillarbox) 형식으로 재생된다.

또 720p 영상 재생을 지원해 720p으로 올라온 영상은 "Watch in HD" 링크를 클릭하거나 주소창에 &fmt=22를 추가하면 고화질 영상을 볼 수 있다.

콘텐츠 접근성

유튜브 웹사이트

사용자는 다양한 여러 파일 포맷으로 영상을 업로드할 수 있다. (MPEG, AVI 등) 유튜브는 이것을 H.263의 변종인 FLV로 변환한 뒤, (확장자는 .flv이다.) 그것을 사용자들이 온라인에서 감상할 수 있도록 해 놓는다. 플래시 영상은 대규모 온라인 동영상 호스팅 사이트들 사이에 가장 인기있는 포맷이다. 플래시 영상의 크나큰 호환성 때문이다. 2007년 6월 초에 이르러, 애플 TV 또는 아이폰으로 스트리밍하는 것을 도와 주는 H.264 영상 표준으로 인코딩된 동영상이 업로드될 수 있도록 허용하었다. 또, 도스박스에서 녹화된 동영상들도 별도의 인코딩 과정 없이 업로드할 수 있다.

사회적 영향

유튜브가 문을 열기 이전에는 일반 컴퓨터 사용자들이 온라인에 동영상을 올려 다른 사람들에게 보여주기 위한 쉬운 방법이 많지 않았다. 유튜브 사용하기 쉬운 환경으로 컴퓨터를 사용하는 누구나 동영상을 올릴 수 있도록 해 몇 분 안에 수백만명이 볼 수 있도록 하였고, 유튜브에서 다루는 넓은 범위의 주제로 비디오 공유를 인터넷 문화의 중요한 한 부분으로 자리잡게 했다.

2006년에는 일렉트로닉 기타로 캐논 변주곡을 연주한 동영상이 'funtwo'라는 사용자명을 사용하는 누군가 유튜브에 올렸고, 즉시 많은 방문자가 이 비디오를 보기 위해 유튜브를 찾았다. 나중에 뉴욕 타임스는 그 해 8월 27일, 연주에 대한 극찬과 함께 이 동영상에서 나오는 이가 23살 대한민국에 사는 무명 기타리스트 임정현이라는 것을 알렸다.

저작권

유튜브의 이용약관에 따르면, 이용자는 자신의 User Submissions 및 이를 게시하거나 출판하여 생기는 결과에 단독으로 모든 책임을 져야 한다. User Submission과 관련하여 이용자는 다음의 사항을 확인, 인정 및/또는 보증한다. 이용자는 유튜브 웹사이트 및 본 약관에서 의도한 바대로 User Submissions의 이용 및 포함을 가능하게 하는, 기타 모든 User Submissions와 관련된 특허권, 상표권, 영업비밀, 저작권 또는 기타 소유권을 유튜브가 이용하는 데에 필요한 면허, 권리, 허가 및 승인을 보유하고 있거나 유튜브에게 위의 권리를 이용 할 수 있는 권한을 부여하게 된다.(제6조 B항)

유튜브 접속 차단

2006년 12월 3일부터 이란에서는 다른 몇몇 사이트와 함께 유튜브 접속을 차단했다. 2007년 3월 6일 터키에서도 국부(國父)를 모독하는 동영상이 게재되었다는 까닭에 접속 차단과 해제가 거듭되었으며 현재는 차단되어 있다. 2007년에 태국에서 왕을 모독하는것이 동영상에 게재되었다는 까닭에 모든 사람들이(유튜브 유저) 한 때 차단이 되었다가 4월에 해제되었다.

2008년 3월 16일, 중국 정부는 유튜브에 티베트 시위 장면이 담긴 동영상 십여편이 올라온 뒤 중국에서의 유튜브 접속을 차단했다

2009년 4월 9일, 유튜브는 대한민국의 인터넷 실명제와 관련하여 국가를 '한국'으로 설정해둔 사용자에 한해 동영상/댓글 업로드 기능을 자발적으로 제한하기로 했다.

<위키백과>

YouTube

This article is about the video hosting website. For the scientific device, see Oscillating U-tube. For the manufacturing company with a similar domain name, see Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment.

YouTube, LLC

Type Subsidiary of Google

Founded : February 15, 2005

Headquarters; San Bruno, California, U.S.

Key people :

Steve Chen, Founder & CTO

Chad Hurley, Founder & CEO

Jawed Karim, Founder & Advisor

Owner : Google Inc.

Slogan : Broadcast Yourself

Website: YouTube.com

list of localized domain names

Type of site video sharing

Advertising Google, AdSense

Registration Optional

(required to upload and comment on videos)

Available in 12 languages

Launched 2005

Current status active

Screenshot

Screenshot of youtube.com home page

YouTube headquarters in San BrunoYouTube is a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips. YouTube was created in mid-February 2005 by three former PayPal employees. The San Bruno-based service uses Adobe Flash technology to display a wide variety of user-generated video content, including movie clips, TV clips and music videos, as well as amateur content such as videoblogging and short original videos. In October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had reached a deal to acquire the company for US$1.65 billion in Google stock. The deal closed on November 13, 2006.

Unregistered users can watch most videos on the site, while registered users are permitted to upload an unlimited number of videos. Some videos are available only to users of age 18 or older (e.g. videos containing potentially offensive content). The uploading of videos containing pornography, nudity, defamation, harassment, commercial advertisements and material encouraging criminal conduct is prohibited. Related videos, determined by title and tags, appear onscreen to the right of a given video. In YouTube's second year, functions were added to enhance user ability to post video 'responses' and subscribe to content feeds.

Few statistics are publicly available regarding the number of videos on YouTube. However, in July 2006, the company revealed that more than 100 million videos were being watched every day, and 2.5 billion videos were watched in June 2006. 50,000 videos were being added per day in May 2006, and this increased to 65,000 by July. In January 2008 alone, nearly 79 million users watched over 3 billion videos on YouTube.

In August 2006, The Wall Street Journal published an article revealing that YouTube was hosting about 6.1 million videos (requiring about 45 terabytes of storage space), and had about 500,000 user accounts. As of April 9, 2008, a YouTube search returns about 83.4 million videos and 3.75 million user channels.

YouTube is currently not profitable, with its revenues being noted as "immaterial" by Google in a regulatory filing. Its bandwidth costs are estimated at approximately $1 million a day.

CNN-YouTube-Republican-Debate

History

Main article: History of YouTube

Domain name problem

YouTube's immense success has unintentionally affected the business of an American company, Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment Corp., whose website, utube.com, was frequently overloaded and shut down by extremely high numbers of visitors unsure about the spelling of YouTube's domain name, but now utube.com is once again operational. At the beginning of November 2006, Universal Tube filed suit in federal court against YouTube, requesting that the youtube.com domain be transferred to them. Since then the web address utube.com has been sold to a YouTube copycat site, while Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment has moved to utubeonline.com.

Recent events

Political campaigning

Political candidates for the 2008 U.S. Presidential election have been using YouTube as an outlet for advertising their candidacies. Voters can view candidate statements and make videos supporting (or opposing) presidential candidates (e.g., videos for Ron Paul, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden). Third Party presidential candidates have also made extensive use of YouTube. Libertarian Steve Kubby's campaign debuted a short animated film, featuring the faces and voices of campaign contributors who financed its production, on YouTube on September 29th, 2007. The U.S. media has often commented that YouTube played a significant role in the 2006 defeat of Republican Senator George Allen due to a video clip of him making allegedly racist remarks that was continuously replayed by YouTube viewers during the campaign. Political commentators such as James Kotecki have also joined the YouTube world of politics. Many commentators make videos on YouTube critiquing a presidential candidate's YouTube videos, or simply using YouTube as a medium to get their opinions heard. Recently, French and Italian politicians, such as Antonio Di Pietro, have also been using the site as part of their campaigns. YouTube has also been used by former Australian Prime Minister John Howard in the lead up to the 2007 federal election.

CNN-YouTube presidential debates

The CNN-YouTube Republican Debate on 2007-11-28 Main article: CNN-YouTube presidential debates

In the run up to the 2008 Presidential elections, CNN aired a debate in which candidates fielded questions selected from a pool submitted by users of YouTube. Because of the use of technology to aggregate questions from a wide range of constituents, the forum has been referred to as "most democratic Presidential Debate ever".

April Fools'

For the 2008 April Fools' day prank, every "Featured Video" on the front page redirected to Rick Astley's "Never Gonna Give You Up," effectively rickrolling everyone who attempted to watch a featured video on the site.

Social impact

Main article: Social impact of YouTube

Blocking

Main article: Blocking of YouTube

YouTube has been blocked in several countries since its inception, including Thailand (which has since been lifted) and Iran. Certain video pages were banned as of October 1, 2007 in Turkey, but this was lifted two days later. More recently on January 22, 2008 Turkey banned YouTube once again but this ban was lifted after three days. Certain pages are also banned in United Arab Emirates.

On February 23, 2008, Pakistan blocked YouTube due to "offensive material" towards the Islamic faith, including the display of pictures of the prophet Muhammad. This action by the Pakistani authorities led to a near global blackout of the YouTube site for at least two hours. Thousands of Pakistanis undermined the 3-day block using a VPN software called Hotspot Shield. The YouTube ban was lifted on February 26, 2008 after the "offensive material" were removed from the site.

Schools in certain countries have begun to block access to YouTube due to students uploading videos of bullying behavior, school fights and racist behavior as well as increased bandwidth usage and other inappropriate content.

Spamming

Main article: Spam targeting video sharing sites

With recent improvements to e-mail spam filtering technology and their wider use, spammers have begun using YouTube as way to advertise: popular videos frequently have comments with links to irrelevant external sites, usually with some enticing statements (such as "Great video, go to <site> for the full version"). To counter this, YouTube has blocked comments with URLs in them since late 2006; if a user tries to post a comment with a URL, it will be discarded and will not show up. As of August 2007, this "feature" seems to have been extended to profile comments as well, although the user will receive an ambiguous "error processing your comment" message. However, posting links is still possible in bulletins, private messages, or group discussions. Also, if a user posts many comments in a short period, they may be asked to complete a CAPTCHA, which was implemented when a notorious spammer abused the lack of a flood control. However, the lack of a CAPTCHA is still present in some areas of the site, particularly in sharing playlists, which has the problem of flooding people's e-mails and sending out "ghost videos." Other examples of spammers include users who use non-related-to-video threats (including "Post this message to <number> friends or your mom will die in <number> hours") They may also send messages to a user's inbox (essentially in the form of a plain-text spam email). Some of these spam accounts also posted pornographic videos on YouTube. A slightly newer feature of YouTube is the ability to send invites to people through email by using the "Invite Your Friends" feature. Originally, this feature was indeed a useful feature to build a bigger community using YouTube. When spammers became aware of this, they decided to give it a try and found every email address possible to send random email invites. More so, they've now been able to cheat the system even more.

“The messages came from service@youtube.com. [...] The messages look like a legitimate YouTube invite, except they include typical spam content like stock pump-and-dump promotions and links to spam Web sites. Many of them use Microsoft's recent XBox 360 hit "Halo 3" as bait, telling the recipient they have won a free copy of the game and to go to a Web site. If they take the bait and click on "winhalo3.com," the Web site infects them with the Storm Worm, which has been hanging around since August.”

Spammers have used this route more often nowadays because they can use it to defeat spam filters, gain more readers and possibly customers. "They just do as all spammers do..."

According YouTube's terms of service, users may upload videos only with permission of the copyright holder and people depicted in the videos. Pornography, nudity, defamation, harassment, commercial advertisements and material encouraging criminal conduct are prohibited. The uploader grants YouTube a license to distribute and modify the uploaded material for any purpose; this license terminates when the uploader deletes the material from the site. Users may view videos on the site as long as they agree to the terms of service; downloading through one's own means or copying of the videos is not permitted.

Further information: Censorship by Google#YouTube

Localization

On June 19, 2007, Eric E. Schmidt was in Paris to launch the new localization system. The entire interface of the website is now available with localized versions in numerous countries:

Country URL Languages Launch date

Australia http://au.youtube.com/ English (Australia) 22 October 2007

Brazil http://br.youtube.com/ Portuguese (Brazil) 19 June 2007

Canada http://ca.youtube.com/ English (Canada) 6 November 2007

France http://fr.youtube.com/ French 19 June 2007

Germany http://de.youtube.com/ German 8 November 2007

Hong Kong http://hk.youtube.com/ Chinese (Traditional) 17 October 2007

Ireland http://ie.youtube.com/ English (Ireland) 19 June 2007[28]

Italy http://it.youtube.com/ Italian 19 June 2007[28]

Japan http://jp.youtube.com/ Japanese 19 June 2007[28]

South Korea http://kr.youtube.com/ Korean 23 January 2008

Mexico http://mx.youtube.com/ Spanish (Mexico) 10 October 2007

Netherlands http://nl.youtube.com/ Dutch 19 June 2007

New Zealand http://nz.youtube.com/ English (New Zealand) 22 October 2007

Poland http://pl.youtube.com/ Polish 19 June 2007

Russia http://ru.youtube.com/ Russian 13 November 2007

Spain http://es.youtube.com/ Spanish 19 June 2007[28]

Republic of China (Taiwan) http://tw.youtube.com/ Chinese (Traditional) 18 October 2007

United Kingdom http://uk.youtube.com/ English (United Kingdom) 19 June 2007

Google aims to compete with local videosharing websites like DailyMotion in France. It also made an agreement with local television stations like M6 and France Télévisions to legally broadcast video content.

On October 17, 2007 it was announced that a Hong Kong version had been launched. YouTube's Steve Chen said its next target will be Taiwan.

On October 22, 2007 YouTube New Zealand had its launch party, stating that its aim was to help create YouTube celebrities within New Zealand. This was quickly evident with the rise of such New Zealand YouTube shows as Three Best Friends That Live Together and LiveFromJoes.

YouTube has been subject to threats of censorship by various countries because of the content it hosts. It was blocked from Mainland China from the 18th October due to the censorship of the Taiwanese flag. URLs to YouTube were redirected to China's own search engine, Baidu. It was subsequently unblocked on the 31st of October.[35] As noted, in February 2008, Youtube was blocked in Pakistan and, within a few weeks, the block was removed.

Technical notes

Video format

Uploading Video on YouTubeAs of November 2007 YouTube plays back videos limited in both size and quality. The size is limited to pixel dimensions of 320 by 240 and the quality is limited to a bitrate of around 314kbit/s with a frame rate dependent on the uploaded video.[37]YouTube limits the playback size and quality by re-encoding the user's uploaded video at the time of upload. In 2006 YouTube permitted playback at higher quality, larger sizes, and in stereo, but some time after January 2007 YouTube applied quality reductions to new uploads.

YouTube's video playback technology is based on Macromedia's Flash Player 9 and uses the Sorenson Spark H.263 video codec. This technology allows the site to display videos with quality comparable to more established video playback technologies (such as Windows Media Player, QuickTime and RealPlayer) that generally require the user to download and install a web browser plugin in order to view video. Flash also requires a plug-in, but Adobe considers the Flash 7 plug-in to be present on about 90% of online computers.[39] The video can also be played back with third-party media players such as GOM Player, gnash, VLC as well as some ffmpeg-based video players.

YouTube converts videos into the Flash Video format after uploading.[40] The different files are stored in obscurely named subdomains, accessible either directly or through YouTube's get_video PHP script[dead link]. YouTube also converts content to other formats so that it can be viewed outside of the website. See below.

YouTube officially accepts uploaded videos in .WMV, .AVI, .MOV, MPEG and .MP4, formats.

Users can view videos in windowed mode or full screen mode and it is possible to switch modes during playback without reloading it due to the full-screen function of Adobe Flash Player 9.

On September 14, 2007, Members of the VIDEOHelp.com forums discovered a method to allow high-quality video and stereo sound. The method involved converting a video to the .flv format YouTube uses, and using a Hex Editor to extend the video's displayed playback time (usually to 10 or 11 minutes for non-Director accounts), thus "tricking" YouTube into believing that the file's bitrate was much lower than it actually was. Although load times significantly increased for videos, both video and sound quality was notably better than in comparable videos uploaded without the method. However, on February 4, 2008, following a maintenance period, YouTube took countermeasures against this method, and it is now impossible to upload high-quality videos[43]. This had no effect on any high-quality videos already uploaded to YouTube.

In March 2008, YouTube launched 'High Quality' versions of its videos. The new version offers a better video definition (480x360) in the AVC format for any video uploaded after this date. YouTube will decide which videos are capable of this improved quality based on the standard of the original upload. Users can choose "always show me higher quality when available" in their Account pages to switch automatically to the better quality.

Asked why YouTube did not choose HD format, the site answered : "Our general philosophy is to make sure that as many people as possible can access YouTube and that videos start quickly and play smoothly. That's one reason why you don't see us racing to call this "Super Duper YouTube HD," because most people don't want to wait a long time for videos to play."

Audio format

YouTube files contain an MP3 audio stream. By default, it is mono-encoding with a 65kbit/s rate at 22050 Hz. However, it is possible to get a stereo audio track if the movie file is manually converted to FLV format using a program such as ffmpeg for Linux and Windows, ffmpegX for Macintosh or the commercial Riva FLV Encoder for Windows.

Content accessibility

On YouTube

As noted above, YouTube accepts common file formats and converts them to the H.263 variant of Flash Video, and makes them available for online viewing. Beginning in June 2007, newly uploaded videos will also be encoded using the H.264 video standard to enable streaming of YouTube videos on the Apple TV, iPhone, and iPod touch.

On Apple TV

Apple Inc. announced on 20 June 2007 that YouTube is accessible on the Apple TV after installation of a free software update. Functionality includes browsing by category, searching videos, and the ability for members to log onto their YouTube accounts directly on Apple TV. Access to thousands of the most current and popular YouTube videos will be available, with plans to add thousands more videos each week. The entire catalog is targeted to be available in fall 2007. According to Apple VP David Moody, the reason for the delay is the need for all current YouTube content to be transcoded to Apple's preferred video standard, H.264. All content uploaded in and after June, however, will be automatically encoded into H.264, rendering additional transcoding unnecessary for these newer files.

On mobile

YouTube launched its mobile site, YouTube Mobile on 15 June 2007. It is based on xHTML and uses 3GP videos with H263/AMR codec and RTSP streaming. It is available via a web interface at m.youtube.com or via YouTube's Mobile Java Application.

On TV

YouTube TV Channel will be on Information TV 2 on January 7, 2008. The channel will air video sharing content from the YouTube website.

On iPhone and iPod touch

Apple announced Wednesday, 20 June 2007 that YouTube would be available on iPhone at launch. Streaming is over WiFi or EDGE.

Videos on YouTube for the iPhone are encoded in Apple's preferred H.264 format. All videos are viewed in the horizontal orientation of the phone. As YouTube videos have 4:3 aspect ratio and the iPhone is 3:2, videos must be viewed with black bars on the side (pillarboxed) or may be zoomed to trim some of the top and bottom to fill the screen.

Not all videos are available on iPhone yet because not every video has been reencoded to H.264. There are two versions of each video on YouTube, one is higher bandwidth for WiFi use, and one is lower resolution for EDGE use.

Unlike the Apple TV version, users cannot log in to their own YouTube accounts, but can create a separate favorites list just for the iPhone.

Outside YouTube

Each video is accompanied by the full HTML markup for linking to it and/or embedding it within another page, unless the submitter of a video chooses to disable the embedding feature. A small addition to the embeddable markup will allow the video to play automatically when the webpage loads. These simple cut-and-paste options are especially popular with users of social-networking sites. Poor experiences, however, have been cited by users of such sites,[45] where autoplaying embedded YouTube videos has been reported to slow down page loading time or even to crash internet browsers.

The YouTube Player is the name of another embeddable applet! (with a different interface), designed for browsing YouTube videos on an iGoogle homepage.

YouTube itself does not make it easy to download and save videos for offline viewing or editing (in fact, YouTube's official FAQ even states that "you can't download our videos to your computer") nor for viewing in external players, but several third-party web sites, applications, browser extensions (such as Firefox extensions) exist for that purpose. Alternatively, most .flv files can be copied from the 'Temporary Internet Files' folder in Windows, or the /tmp directory in GNU systems, to a permanent folder. The .flv files can then be viewed and edited directly or converted to other formats using various applications such as VLC media player or FLVPlayer.

YouTube Remixer

On June 18, 2007, YouTube launched its online video editing tool, YouTube Remixer. The tool allows users to edit their YouTube videos online, although the editing tools are very limited.

Channel type

Members of YouTube.com are offered to be a part of groups called "Channel Types" that make their channel more distinctive. The types are:

YouTuber, a general viewer of YouTube.

Director, movie makers displaying their videos for YouTube viewers.

Musician, musicians or bands covering songs or displaying originals or giving lessons on songs, scales, chords, etc.

Comedian, comedians displaying their comedy bits for YouTube viewers.

Guru, people who are experienced in a certain field make videos of what they do.

Not-for-profit, a status obtained by 501(c) not-for-profit organizations accepted into YouTube's not-for-profit program.

Video rankings

YouTube awards videos with honors, the most popular of which is "most viewed" which are divided into four categories: today, this week, this month and all time. Honors include:

Most Viewed topped by Judson Laipply's Evolution of Dance

Top Rated

Most Discussed

Top Favorites

Most Linked

Recently Featured

Most Responded

YouTube Video Awards

Main article: YouTube Awards

In 2006, YouTube presented the annual YouTube Video Awards. Categories include "'most adorable video ever" and "most creative." YouTube nominates the contenders, and users decide the winners. Only original, user created videos are nominated. Nominees for the 2006 awards included Peter Oakley (geriatric1927), LonelyGirl15, thewinekone, Renetto and Chad Vader.

Criticism

Main article: Criticism of YouTube