Check out the most popular YouTube videos ever, a rage in video based social media.
YouTube created by three former Paypal employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, in February 2005 was brought by Google Inc for $1.65 billion in November 2006.The domain name www.youtube.com was registered on February 14, 2005, and the website has now become a video major that is being embraced by all forms of media online and offline.
By May 2010, it is reported that YouTube has been serving more than two billion videos daily, which in its words is ”nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major US television networks combined.”
Now let us look at the top 5 most popular YouTube videos of all time.
Charlie Bit My Finger: ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ is the most viewed video of YouTube, being watched the world over for over 170 million times. This simple home video that can easily beat some of the most stylish looking Youtube videos, has recorded more than 190 million hits as of June 2010.
The video is just 56 seconds long and features two little British boys, who are brothers, aged three and one. The father of the boys Howard Davies-Carr uploaded the video in May 2007 so that it could be viewed online by their godfather who lived in the United States. Since then, it has become a cult watch on YouTube. The proud father says, . “The clip only went up as I wanted to share it with the boys’ godfather.I was naive about the whole YouTube thing. It became viral and once that happened there was nothing I could do. People have sent lovely comments and messages and I now upload a new video of the boys every six weeks.”
The boys of course are now stars on the Internet horizon. Both of them have their own video series, blogs. Limited edition ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ T-shirts and calendars are popular. Shelly, the mother of the two kids thinks that the British accent of the kids became the highpoint among the US audiences, and thereafter, the world.
Web experts say that the Davies-Carr family stand to earn £100,000 from “Charlie Bit My Finger”, mostly from advertisements shown during the video. Time magazine has ranked ‘Charlie Bit My Finger’ as the number one viral video of all time.