
The portal was developed in February 2005 by three former PayPal employees and bought by Google in November 2006 for more than a billion and a half dollars. The numbers alone speak loudly enough to the success of the first ten years.
The site frequented by the young and the old receives over 800 millions of unique visitors monthly, who upload 300 hours of video to the portal every minute. The Alexa website, which processes data on website visits, puts YouTube in third place of the most visited sites, right behind Google and Facebook. This is reflected in the advertising revenue, which is the main source of income for the site.