YouTube celebrated its 20th birthday on April 23, something CEO Neal Mohan proudly shared on his social media. It was also the day the first-ever video, titled "Me at the zoo", was uploaded to the red platform by Jawed Karim, its co-founder. It had a massive 355 million views at the time of writing.
In Neal Mohan's own words, "What started as a simple video-sharing platform has grown into a force, driving culture and fundamentally reshaping how we watch and create entertainment."
Today, YouTube is not just a tech mega power with an incredibly versatile and diverse community, but arguably home to the largest roster of content creators globally. The people who upload videos and live stream on the Google-owned service include artists, gamers, sports influencers, and multinational companies.
The red platform is the world's second-most-visited website and, unofficially, the second-largest search engine, behind only Google, its parent company, on both counts. It is also the second most popular social media network worldwide, behind Facebook, as of February 2025.
Interestingly, Google celebrated this milestone by rolling out a few new features on YouTube, including a personalized radio station on the video-sharing site using Ask Music and 4x playback speed for Premium subscribers. The former is also available for YouTube Music users, with more details on the addition of such new features accessible on the YouTube blog.
Streams Charts has also rummaged through its database and the internet to find some facts about YouTube over the years, and the more interesting ones have been listed below.
Top YouTube records from the last 20 years
- All-time Peak Viewers on the platform: 19.6 million concurrent viewers on January 5, 2025 (during the ASEAN Championship 2024 final)
- Most subscribed channel: Jimmy "MrBeast" Donaldson (386 million subscribers)
- Most popular channel: 8,090,676 PV by ISRO Official (during the Chandrayaan-3 mission's successful moon landing on August 26, 2023)
- Most popular gaming channel: 2,490,518 PV by Nintendo 公式チャンネル (during the Nintendo Direct: Nintendo Switch 2 reveal on April 2, 2025)
- Most popular VTuber: 735,149 PV by Minato Aqua (during her Hololive graduation on August 28, 2024)
- Most popular female channel: 1,016,047 PV by Najwa Shihab (during her coverage of the Fifth and Final Round of the Indonesian Presidential Candidate Debate on February 4, 2024)
- Best month for watch time: January 2025 (5.16 billion Hours Watched)
- Most-viewed video: Baby Shark Dance (15.84 billion views)
- Most-viewed channel: T-Series (292 billion views)
It's been quite a ride for YouTube over the last 20 years, growing from a small video-uploading platform to a global behemoth that most users with phones and PCs/laptops cannot live without. With the livestreaming service now recognized as a tech giant that can shape pop culture and has an undoubted social impact globally, its continued evolution is an intriguing watch. It remains to be seen what form it will take over the next two decades and further down the line.
