In April 2013, it was reported that Universal Music Group and YouTube have a contractual agreement that prevents content blocked on YouTube by a request from UMG from being restored, even if the uploader of the video files a DMCA counter-notice. In April 2012, a court in Hamburg ruled that YouTube could be held responsible for copyrighted material posted by its users. YouTube's owner Google announced in November 2015 that they would help cover the legal cost in select cases where they believe fair use defenses apply. From 2007 to 2009 organizations including Viacom, Mediaset, and the English Premier League have filed lawsuits against YouTube, claiming that it has done too little to prevent the uploading of copyrighted material. YouTube has an estimated 14.8 billion videos with about 4% of those never having a view.
- Get the official YouTube app on iPhones and iPads.
- Starting with the Oculus Quest, the app was updated for compatibility with mixed-reality passthrough modes on VR headsets.
- Prior to 2020, Google did not provide detailed figures for YouTube’s running costs, and YouTube’s revenues in 2007 were noted as “not material” in a regulatory filing.
- The platform was first tested in India and later expanded to other countries, including the United States in March 2021, with videos now able to be up to 1 minute long.
- In March 2007, it struck a deal with the BBC for three channels with BBC content, one for news and two for entertainment.
- Some YouTube videos have themselves had a direct effect on world events, such as Innocence of Muslims (2012) which spurred protests and related anti-American violence internationally.
- YouTube has faced numerous challenges and criticisms in its attempts to deal with copyright, including the site’s first viral video, Lazy Sunday, which had to be taken down, due to copyright concerns.
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- YouTube Play Buttons, a part of the YouTube Creator Rewards, are a recognition by YouTube of its most popular channels.
- YouTube began offering free-to-view movie titles to its users in November 2018; selections of new movies are added and others removed, unannounced each month.
- On February 1, 2018, it was rolled out in 130 countries worldwide, including Brazil, Mexico, Turkey, and Iraq.
- A YouTube spokesperson stated that while the policy itself was not new, the service had “improved the notification and appeal process to ensure better communication to our creators”.
- In 2013, YouTube teamed up with satirical newspaper company The Onion to claim in an uploaded video that the video-sharing website was launched as a contest which had finally come to an end, and would shut down for ten years before being re-launched in 2023, featuring only the winning video.
- In early April 2017, the YouTube channel h3h3Productions presented evidence claiming that a Wall Street Journal article had fabricated screenshots showing major brand advertising on an offensive video containing Johnny Rebel music overlaid on a Chief Keef music video, citing that the video itself had not earned any ad revenue for the uploader.
- The study also concluded that YouTube was becoming an important platform by which people acquire news.
The company stated the decision was in response to experiments which confirmed that smaller YouTube creators were more likely to be targeted in dislike brigading and harassment. On April 9, 2025, YouTube expressed support for the NO FAKES Act of 2025, introduced by Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) and Senator Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), and announced an expansion of its pilot program that is designed to identify content generated by AI. On July 30, 2025, amid the implementation of the Online Safety Act 2023 in the United Kingdom, Google announced that it would begin to enforce "age assurance" policies for selected users in the United States as a trial. Around the same time, YouTube started using server-side ad injection, which allows the platform to inject the ads directly into the video, instead of having the ad as a separate file which can be blocked. In April 2024, YouTube announced it would be "strengthening our enforcement on third-party apps that violate YouTube's Terms of Service, specifically ad-blocking apps".
In August 2008, a US court ruled in Lenz v. Universal Music Corp. that copyright holders cannot order the queenwin casino registration removal of an online file without first determining whether the posting reflected fair use of the material. Any successful complaint about copyright infringement results in a YouTube copyright strike. Despite this advice, many unauthorized clips of copyrighted material remain on YouTube. On August 5, 2015, YouTube patched the formerly notorious behavior which caused a video's view count to freeze at "301" (later "301+") until the actual count was verified to prevent view count fraud. YouTube has been led by a CEO since its founding in 2005, beginning with Chad Hurley, who led the company until 2010. The decision of Alphabet to bring back YouTube creators who engaged in misinformation was criticized for prioritizing "free expression" over "facts".
In 2010, YouTube temporarily released a "TEXTp" mode which rendered video imagery into ASCII art letters "in order to reduce bandwidth costs by $1 per second." The next year, when clicking on a video on the main page, the whole page turned upside down, which YouTube claimed was a "new layout". Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov labeled the court decision as "symbolic" and warned Google that it "should not be restricting the actions of our broadcasters on its platform."
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It was distinct from the company's main Android app and allowed videos to be downloaded and shared with other users. On October 28, 2015, the service was relaunched as YouTube Red, offering ad-free streaming of all videos and access to exclusive original content. By 2019, creators were having videos taken down or demonetized when Content ID identified even short segments of copyrighted music within a much longer video, with different levels of enforcement depending on the record label. In December 2012, two billion views were removed from the view counts of Universal and Sony music videos on YouTube, prompting a claim by The Daily Dot that the views had been deleted due to a violation of the site's terms of service, which ban the use of automated processes to inflate view counts. The platform aims to penalize creators using misleading or sensationalized titles, with potential actions including video removal or channel suspension.
Creators are taking over TV – here are 10 tips
Starting in June 2024, Google Chrome announced that it would be replacing Manifest V2 in favor of Manifest V3, effectively killing support for most ad-blockers. In late October 2023, YouTube began cracking down on the use of ad blockers on the platform. On February 16, 2023, Wojcicki announced that she would step down as CEO, with Neal Mohan named as her successor. In 2020, Roku removed the YouTube TV app from its streaming store after the two companies were unable to reach an agreement. After a 2018 complaint alleging violations of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA), the company was fined $170 million by the FTC for collecting personal information from minors under the age of 13.
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Usually, no more than half of the eligible videos have a pre-roll advertisement, due to a lack of interested advertisers. According to TubeMogul, in 2013 a pre-roll advertisement on YouTube (one that is shown before the video starts) cost advertisers on average $7.60 per 1000 views. Google stated that it had "begun an extensive review of our advertising policies and have made a public commitment to put in place changes that give brands more control over where their ads appear".
YouTube officially launched the "polymer" redesign of its user interfaces based on Material Design language as its default, as well as a redesigned logo that is built around the service's play button emblem in August 2017. The lawsuit was filed due to alleged copyright infringement of Viacom's material by YouTube. That year, the company again changed its interface and at the same time, introduced a new logo with a darker shade of red. On October 9, 2006, Google announced that they had acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock. The choice of the name youtube.com led to problems for a similarly named website, utube.com.
In July 2023, YouTube removed the channel of British journalist Graham Phillips, active in covering the war in Donbas from 2014. In June 2022, the War Gonzo channel run by Russian military blogger and journalist Semyon Pegov was deleted. In 2021, two accounts linked to RT DE, the German channel of the Russian state-owned RT network, were removed for breaching YouTube's policies relating to COVID-19. Should the uploader want to monetize the video again, they may remove the disputed audio in the "Video Manager". Google CEO Eric Schmidt regarded this system as necessary for resolving lawsuits such as the one from Viacom, which alleged that YouTube profited from content that it did not have the right to distribute. In the 2011 case of Smith v. Summit Entertainment LLC, professional singer Matt Smith sued Summit Entertainment for the wrongful use of copyright takedown notices on YouTube.
The government demanded assurances that its advertising would "be delivered safely and appropriately". In May 2013, YouTube introduced a trial scheme of 53 subscription channels with prices ranging from $0.99 to $6.99 a month. In June 2008, a Forbes magazine article projected the 2008 revenue at $200 million, noting progress in advertising sales. According to a 2020 study, viewership of far-right videos on YouTube peaked in 2017 and "a growing body of journalistic evidence" suggested that YouTube was radicalizing young men through its recommendation engine, but that such evidence was "fraught with a bias towards sensationalism". TED curator Chris Anderson described a phenomenon by which geographically distributed individuals in a certain field share their independently developed skills in YouTube videos, thus challenging others to improve their own skills, and spurring invention and evolution in that field. Some YouTube videos have themselves had a direct effect on world events, such as Innocence of Muslims (2012) which spurred protests and related anti-American violence internationally.
