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. YouTube Movies & TV is a video on demand (VOD) service that offers movies and television shows for purchase or rental, depending on availability, along with a selection of movies (encompassing between 100 and 500 titles overall) that are free to stream, with interspersed ad breaks. As of September 2019, the app is available in 69 countries, including Hong Kong and Macau, and one province. YouTube Kids is an American children's video app developed by YouTube, a subsidiary of Google. YouTube Premium (formerly Music Key and YouTube Red) is YouTube's premium subscription service.
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Whereas YouTube's inherent ability to allow presidents to directly connect with average citizens was noted, the YouTube content creators' new media savvy was perceived necessary to better cope with the website's distracting content and fickle audience. President Obama held a meeting at the White House with leading YouTube content creators not only to promote awareness of Obamacare but more generally to develop ways for government to better connect with the "YouTube Generation". Concurrently, old media celebrities moved into the website at the invitation of a YouTube management that witnessed early content creators accruing substantial followings and perceived audience sizes potentially larger than that attainable by television.
YouTube Primetime Channels
In 2016, YouTube introduced an option to watch every video on the platform in 360-degree mode with Snoop Dogg. The next year, YouTube added a music button to the video bar that played samples from "Sandstorm" by Darude. A video of two presenters announcing the nominated videos streamed live for 12 hours.
In 2020, Roku removed the YouTube TV app from its streaming store after the two companies were unable to reach an agreement. Joining the YouTube Kids app, the company created a supervised mode, designed more for tweens, in 2021. In response to EU officials requesting that such services reduce bandwidth to make sure medical entities had sufficient bandwidth to share information, YouTube and Netflix said they would reduce streaming quality for at least thirty days as to cut bandwidth use of their services by 25% to comply with the EU's request. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when most of the world was under stay-at-home orders, usage of services like YouTube significantly increased. YouTube released a mobile app known as YouTube Kids in 2015, which was designed to provide an experience optimized for children. Through this period, YouTube tried several new ways to generate revenue beyond advertisements.
new features to help creators shine on TV screens
- Through this period, YouTube tried several new ways to generate revenue beyond advertisements.
- The Guardian newspaper, as well as other major British and U.S. brands, similarly suspended their advertising on YouTube in response to their advertising appearing near offensive content.
- Users of ad blockers may be given a pop-up warning saying “Video player will be blocked after 3 videos”.
- Under YouTube’s changes to its recommendation engine, the most-recommended channel evolved from conspiracy theorist Alex Jones (2016) to Fox News (2019).
- 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.
- It was distinct from the company’s main Android app and allowed videos to be downloaded and shared with other users.
The developer, Google, indicated that the app’s privacy practices may include handling of data as described below. Get the official YouTube app on iPhones and iPads.
In March 2017, the government of the United Kingdom pulled its advertising campaigns from YouTube, after reports that its ads had appeared on videos containing extremist content. Access to specific videos is sometimes prevented due to copyright and intellectual property protection laws (e.g. in Germany), violations of hate speech, and preventing access to videos judged inappropriate for youth, which is also done by YouTube with the YouTube Kids app and with "restricted mode". On November 1, 2022, YouTube launched Primetime Channels, a channel store platform offering third-party subscription streaming add-ons bristino casino review sold a la carte through the YouTube website and app, competing with similar subscription add-on stores operated by Apple, Prime Video and Roku. 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.
- 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.
- At the time of uploading a video, YouTube users are shown a message asking them not to violate copyright laws.
- 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.
- The lawsuit was filed due to alleged copyright infringement of Viacom’s material by YouTube.
- 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.
- They created posts on Craigslist asking attractive women to upload videos of themselves to YouTube in exchange for a $100 reward.
In January 2024, YouTube had more than 2.7 billion monthly active users, who collectively watched more than one billion hours of videos every day. See what the world is watching — from the hottest music videos to what’s popular in gaming, fashion, beauty, news, learning and more. In the United States as of November 2020, and June 2021 worldwide, YouTube reserves the right to monetize any video on the platform, even if their uploader is not a member of the YouTube Partner Program.
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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. On November 11, 2021, after testing out this change in March of the same year, YouTube announced it would start hiding dislike counts on videos, making them invisible to viewers. That was disputed by Billboard, which said that the two billion views had been moved to Vevo, since the videos were no longer active on YouTube.
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 September 2020, YouTube announced that it would be launching a beta version of a new platform of 15-second videos, similar to TikTok, called YouTube Shorts. It was distinct from the company's main Android app and allowed videos to be downloaded and shared with other users.
The lawsuit was filed due to alleged copyright infringement of Viacom's material by YouTube. Hurley announced that he would be stepping down as chief executive officer of YouTube to take an advisory role and that Salar Kamangar would take over as head of the company in October 2010. That year, the company simplified its interface to increase the time users would spend on the site. 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.
A Pew Research Center study reported the development of "visual journalism", in which citizen eyewitnesses and established news organizations share in content creation. By early 2013, Billboard had announced that it was factoring YouTube streaming data into calculation of the Billboard Hot 100 and related genre charts. Videos of the 2.5% of artists categorized as "mega", "mainstream" and "mid-sized" received 90.3% of the relevant views on YouTube and Vevo in that year. Indie creators have built grassroots followings numbering in the thousands at very little cost or effort, while mass retail and radio promotion proved problematic. Businesses, schools, government agencies, and other private institutions often block social media sites, including YouTube, due to its bandwidth limitations and the site's potential for distraction.
This will occur on channels whose content is deemed "advertiser-friendly", and all revenue will go directly to Google without any share given to the uploader. DeFranco argued that not being able to earn advertising revenue on such videos was "censorship by a different name". The move was seen as an attempt to ensure that videos being monetized did not lead to controversy, but was criticized for penalizing smaller YouTube channels. YouTube typically takes 45 percent of the advertising revenue from videos in the Partner Program, with 55 percent going to the uploader. In May 2007, YouTube launched its Partner Program (YPP), a system based on AdSense which allows the uploader of the video to share the revenue produced by advertising on the site. Since its founding in 2005, the American video-sharing website YouTube has been faced with a growing number of privacy issues, including allegations that it allows users to upload unauthorized copyrighted material and allows personal information from young children to be collected without their parents' consent.
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 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. The decision of Alphabet to bring back YouTube creators who engaged in misinformation was criticized for prioritizing "free expression" over "facts". The user must go through age verification via payment, scanned ID, or selfie to access all features if they are detected to be a minor.