YouTube celebrated its fifth birthday in May 2010 by announcing more than two billion views a day. Users uploaded 24 hours of video every minute in March and 35 hours a minute by November. The player still ran on Flash for most people, an HTML5 beta had just begun, and the upload limit rose from 10 to 15 minutes in July.
The 2010 YouTube page was white with light grey panels: a red-and-white logo, a search box, the video in a Flash player, a column of related videos on the right, and comments below with thumbs-up and thumbs-down. Five-star ratings gave way to like and dislike buttons early in the year. A yellow Subscribe button sat beside the uploader's name.
Bed Intruder Song was the most-watched video uploaded in 2010, according to YouTube's own year-end list. Annoying Orange, Ray William Johnson's Equals Three, Smosh, nigahiga and Fred were among the biggest channels, and Vevo (launched December 2009) put official music videos on the site.
- Domain in 2010
- youtube.com
- Launched
- 14 February 2005
- Founders
- Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, Jawed Karim
- Owner in 2010
- Status today
- Still active
What people used it for
- Watching viral videos, music videos and vlogs
- Uploading home videos and sketches
- Embedding videos on blogs and MySpace
Interface characteristics
- White page with grey panels and a red-and-white logo
- Flash video player with 360p default and 480p/720p/1080p options
- Related videos column on the right
- Comments with thumbs up and down
- Yellow Subscribe button
Notable features
- HTML5 player beta (January 2010)
- Like/dislike replacing five-star ratings (2010)
- 15-minute upload limit (July 2010)
- Two billion daily views (May 2010)
- Vevo music videos
What happened later
YouTube retired Flash for HTML5 in 2015, grew past two billion monthly users, and became the centre of the creator economy.
Archived on the Wayback Machine
Archived pages open on web.archive.org (Internet Archive). They are historical captures, not part of this exhibit.
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