When three former PayPal employees, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, registered the domain 20 years ago, they wanted to create an online dating site based around videos of users. In 2016, Chen told the SXSW conference: "We thought dating would be the obvious choice.

YouTube is elated to broadcast some numbers underscoring its dominance, including its recent report that viewers worldwide stream more than a billion hours of content on their TVs every day. That’s televisions, not handheld devices or computers — which one would assume drives that number a lot higher.

YouTube is a massive competitor to TV, an engagement beast, uploading as much new video every five minutes as the 2,400 hours BBC Studios produces in a whole year. The 26-year-old YouTube star Mr Beast earned US$85 million (£67 million) in 2024 from videos – ranging from live Call of Duty play-alongs to handing out 1,