YouTube Turns 5 (That's 1700 in Human Years)

YouTube went operational five years ago on April 23, 2005 with the posting of the above video, Me at the zoo. That 19 seconds has been viewed over 2 million times.

Jawed Karim is the YouTube co-founder seen in this video. He left YouTube in its first year to get a graduate degree in computer science from Stanford University. That could be the most expensive graduate degree in history.

Jawed is reported to have received 137,443 shares in Google when that company bought YouTube in October 2006. That was worth $64 million then, and would be worth $75 million now. But the other two YouTube co-founders, Chad Hurley and Steven Chen, received $345 million and $326 million apiece. You do the math.

By my calculations, 1 YouTube year is equivalent to 340 human years. According to YouTube, every minute another 24 hours of video is uploaded. And it would take 1700 years to watch all the videos posted to date. That's a lot of trips to the zoo.