Lazy Sunday

Hi Tubers! NBC recently contacted YouTube and asked us to remove Saturday Night Live's "Lazy Sunday: Chronicles of Narnia" video. We know how popular that video is but YouTube respects the rights of copyright holders. You can still watch SNL's "Lazy Sunday" video for free on NBC's website.

Some good news: we are happy to report that YouTube is now serving up more than 15 million videos streamed per day- that's nearly 465M videos streamed per month with 20,000 videos being uploaded daily.

Keep broadcasting!

It's Hammer Time!

Things are really picking up around here. Not only are we adding servers and bandwidth as fast as we can, we're also pleased to report that last month's kitchen sink upgrade was successfully integrated into the snack area and we hope to have that dirty dishes bug patched shortly.

As if we didn't have enough reasons to be excited, the other night we got a visit from MC HAMMER! Hammer came by the office to lend a hand and showed us the sweet new video for his song Look. While Hammer was here he dropped some serious science about the recording industry and taught us the difference between Hyphy, Thizz and Krumping. Check out the video, it's totally hyphy (see??). We gave him the grand tour and of course shot some video. Be sure to check out our awesome giant-curtain-wall-substitutes and the crazy tribal pattern we pimped our office walls with (it actually represents bandwidth but we all got it tattooed on our ankles anyway).

More Feature Fun

We've just rolled out a bunch of cool new features. Many of these come straight from requests or suggestions from all of you, so please keep those ideas coming.

• Groups brings Tubers Together
  
  Sure, it's great to send your favorite videos to your friends and family, but now you can take it one step further and create (or join) groups to share and discuss videos with other YouTube members! Each group has it's own forum, and for added control the group founder can decide if they want the group to be public and open to everyone, or private where membership is granted by request or invitation only. As a group founder you get to choose a custom URL for the group - your very own little video home on the web! So whether you join a public group to connect with other members who have the same video interests that you do, or create a private group to securely share and discuss videos with your friends and family - there's a group for you. Getting started is easy, just click on the Groups tab and start browsing or creating!




• I want my RSS!
  
  By popular demand, we've added a ton of new RSS feeds. You can now subscribe to several different feeds for categorized groups of videos (such as recently uploaded, recently featured, top viewed etc), as well as customized feeds for users and tags. You can even get a feed for this blog! Check out our new and improved RSS page and start subscribing!




• Friends Reloaded
  
  One of the areas we get a lot of questions about is friends management - how to delete a friend, how to organize friends etc. Well, we've heard you loud and clear and have (hopefully) dramatically simplified this process. When you visit the Friends tab, you can now easily delete a friend, or create personalized contact lists with a simple click of the mouse (well, maybe two clicks, but it's still really easy).




• Search and Ye Shall Find
  
  Searching on YouTube just got a whole lot easier. No more scrolling through pages and pages of search results to find the video you want, you can now filter your results by relevance, date added, title, view count or rating.

YouTube on the Rise

Happy New Years, Tubers! We hope you all had a restful and joyous holiday. 2005 went out with bang for us as our traffic has continued to soar to record numbers. However, as many of you noticed, the performance of our video upload process has been a bit lackluster the past few weeks. Recently, we've had users reporting video upload times anywhere from a few hours to a few days. First and foremost, we sincerely apologize for the degradation in service you may have experienced and any inconvenience it may have caused you. Bradley, our sys admin, explains in a bit more detail the issues we're encountering, what caused them and what we're doing about it:




Issue: Slow video uploads

Cause: Most consumer internet connections upload much slower than they download. So, uploading a 100 megabyte video via a DSL or cable modem will require a lot of time, upwards of multiple hours.

Resolution: We ask that for your patience when uploading large files. However, we are working on improving the upload page by adding a status tracker to let you know that the upload is still in progress.



Issue: Upload processing time. Some users are experiencing long waits during the "Processing" phase, after a video upload is complete.

Cause: Due to the extreme growth we've had recently (thanks!), we've started to run short on the servers required to perform this intensive task.

Resolution: Fortunately, we have plenty of machines on the way and expect this to be remedied shortly.



Issue: Video pausing. During peak hours users may occasionally notice that new or popular videos are slow to download, causing a pausing effect.

Cause: YouTube is currently serving over 45 terabytes of video per day. This is equal to 75,000 dial-up modems running at full speed for an entire day.

Resolution: To keep up with this demand and future growth, we're constantly working on ways to improve our internet connectivity. We expect some of our most recent additions to come online over the next few days and weeks.



So, while we're all extremely excited and thankful for the tremendous viral growth we've been experiencing, we've got a lot more bills to pay these days (including one for the kitchen sink we're finally getting - no more washing our coffee mugs in the bathroom!). Since YouTube's inception, one of the things we've been passionate, if not fanatical about, is that our service must always remain free to our users - no strings attached. In order to be able to keep this mantra, and not have to pass on a dime of costs to our users, we've started implementing some advertising on the site to help pay for our operating expenses (as well as that kitchen sink). Our goal is to not disrupt the video viewing experience in any way - and hopefully - if we do this right, we might even be able to enhance your experience.









Our mission at YouTube is simple, to provide our users with the best online video service imaginable, for free. Little things may change here and there on the site to continue to make that possible, but ultimately, the goal itself will never change.

Welcome to Our World...




For quite awhile we've been discussing how and when we should start integrating ourselves more within the YouTube community. There's obviously a multitude of reasons we want to do this. First and foremost, we need you. We need an open and honest discourse with our users to understand what works, what doesn't, what features you would really like to see, what little annoying things on the site really piss you off. We want to hear it all, the good, the bad and the ugly.




Secondly, we want you to know us, how we work, what we're doing and the challenges we deal with. We get such an intimate view (sometimes a little too 'intimate' admittedly) into the lives of so many of users, it's about time you start seeing us as well.




So, what have we been up to lately? Thanks to all of you, our growth has been absolutely phenomenal these past months. And as you can probably imagine, with such rapid growth comes a whole host of scalability problems. Believe me, these are the best kind of problems to have, but they are still problems none the less, and we've spent much of our time and energy focused on just dealing with the amount of traffic we're getting. This has been a bit frustrating for all of us, since it distracts us from improving the site and working on new features as much as we would like to. However, we're continuing to do things to improve the scalability and stability of our site which will give us more time to focus on what matters most - bringing you all the features you want to see.




We did push out some new features this week that we're all pretty excited about. We'd love to get your feedback. Seriously, developing features in a black box sucks, so let us know what you think.




For your viewing pleasure I put together some clips of all us here at YouTube (I have to admit to being an iMovie novice, so please excuse the amateur editing). The video opens in Chad's garage oh so many months sketching out the very first layout drawings of the site. That's Steve (our other fearless leader) taking the video and talking in the background. This is followed by our last day working in our VC's office, first days in our new office and out to dinner celebrating our funding close. No more hiding, you now get to see what true dorks we all really are.

That's all for now. We're committed to keeping you as closely involved and informed as possible with what's going on in our world, so please check back here often for more updates, features, ideas and feedback.




Here are all the new features we just released. Again, we encourage your thoughts, ideas and feedback.

• Logged In Home Page
  
  We finally cleaned this page up. It's been one of my personal #1 pet peeves with the site that I'd rather see the logged out home page, than the logged in home page. Every single time I login, all I see is my subscribed videos, and all of the cool new content is pushed way down the page. So, we finally cleaned this up, and added a cool new scrolling format for viewing videos. We've also added this 'video inbox' idea. Basically anytime someone sends you a video, or you get a subscription, it will appear in your video 'inbox'.




• Subscriptions Center
  
  Again, we just cleaned up the UI for this feature but we also added the ability to subscribe to tags. Conceptually, I really dig the idea of subscribing to tags, and I'm eager to see if the community uses this feature.




• New Video Player
  
  New look and feel for the video player. Hopefully you all will find this cleaner and easier to use.




• Blocking/Reporting a User
  
  Sure, we would all like to believe that people are basically good, but unfortuently the truth of the matter is on any site like ours, there are going to be problem users. Blocking a user is now the easiest way to stop a harassing or malicious user. From both your message center, and from the user's profile page, you can choose to block that user. This prevents the user from commenting on your videos, or sending you messages. Additionally, you can report a user to us from their profile page if you feel the user has been continuously abusing YouTube or posting offensive content.




• Message Center
  
  We cleaned up some of the old annoying things about the message center, like not being able to delete new messages. Hopefully this will make the message center easier to use, and will help encourage inter member communications.




• Profiles
  We added 'my recent videos' to all user profiles. This is really just a baby step towards us continuing to build out user profiles and allow for more customized content.

Greetings, everyone! We've spent the last few weeks enhancing some of our existing features and adding new things that you, our users, have requested. So, please keep your comments and suggestions coming! We depend on you all to help keep YouTube the best video website on the web.

• 
  Feature This!
  
  We want you to have a voice in what videos get featured on our home page. Whenever you see an entertaining, creative or funny video that you think other users would like to see as well, flag it 'Feature This!' and we'll review it for consideration in 'Today's Featured Videos'.
  




• 
  More Playlists Features
  
  It's now easier then ever to organize and share your playlists! All of your videos and your favorites are now automatically imported into your Playlist Manager, so that you can easily copy these videos into the new playlists that you create. Did you put together an awesome collection of videos that you want to share with your family and friends? No problem! Just send them the URL that's now conveniently displayed for each one of your playlists.
  




• 
  Threaded Comments (suggested by dearcrissy)
  
  Have you ever tried to respond to someone's comment on a video? Gets a little confusing trying to figure out who is replying to whom, doesn't it? With threaded comments, you can now respond directly to another user's comment -- and not only that, but you'll also get notified anytime someone replies to your comment.
  




• 
  Required Tags
  
  You've just uploaded a video of your dog. You put "chihuahua" and "dog" in the tags field, but you're at a loss for that third tag to describe your video. We've heard your cries, and decreased the number of required tags from three to one.
  




• 
  Most Viewed Videos
  
  We've updated Most Viewed to insure that you're always getting the most up to date videos. Whether you're watching most viewed today, this week, or this month you'll be watching the most viewed videos that were uploaded within that time period. For example, most viewed today will be the videos with the most views that were uploaded within the past 24 hours.
  

YOUTUBE RECEIVES $3.5M IN FUNDING FROM SEQUOIA CAPITAL

MENLO PARK, Calif. - November 7, 2005 - YouTube, a consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos through a Web experience, today announced it has completed a $3.5M round of private equity funding from Sequoia Capital. YouTube, founded by Internet commerce pioneers from PayPal, has developed a new service that allows people to easily upload, tag, and share personal video clips through www.YouTube.com and across the Internet on other sites, blogs and through e-mail. The service also allows users to create their own personal video network.

This investment will be used to accelerate the company's rapid growth, enhance product development and expand sales and marketing efforts.

"With more and more people carrying around devices that capture video-from digital cameras to cell phones-YouTube is set to become an essential destination for watching and sharing these experiences," said Chad Hurley, CEO and co-founder of YouTube. "We are very pleased by the support of Sequoia Capital. Since our public preview, we are already moving 8 terabytes of data per day through the YouTube community - the equivalent of moving one Blockbuster store a day over the Internet."

Prior to YouTube, it was not easy for people to make video available on the Web. The burden was on the user to support all the media players and the 100s of multimedia formats. YouTube is using its advanced technology infrastructure so consumers can broadcast their videos globally in a fast, fun and easy way.

"We are very excited to be involved with YouTube at a time when consumers are poised to benefit from all the consumer electronics available. The demand for user-generated content continues to grow exponentially," said Roelof Botha, Sequoia Capital partner and former CFO of PayPal. "We've already seen user-generated content blossom in text through blogging, in photographs through services like Flickr and Shutterfly, and in audio through podcasting. YouTube is pioneering the next wave to become Internet's premier video service."

About YouTube

Founded in February 2005, YouTube is a consumer media company for people to watch and share original videos worldwide through a Web experience. Founded by early commerce pioneers of PayPal, YouTube allows people to easily upload, tag, and share personal video clips through www.YouTube.com and across the Internet on other sites, blogs and through e-mail, as well as to create their own personal video network. With investment support from Sequoia Capital, YouTube is set to become the Internet's premier video service.

About Sequoia Capital

Since 1972, Sequoia Capital has provided startup venture capital for very smart people who want to turn ideas into companies. As the "Entrepreneurs Behind the Entrepreneurs", Sequoia Capital's Partners have worked with innovators such as Sandy Lerner and Len Bozack of Cisco Systems, Jerry Yang and David Filo of Yahoo!, Gaurav Garg of Redback Networks, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, Dan Warmenhoven of Network Appliance, T.J. Rodgers of Cypress Semiconductor, Lou Tomasetta of Vitesse Semiconductor, Steve Jobs of Apple Computer and Larry Ellison of Oracle. The companies organized by Sequoia Capital now account for about 10% of the value of NASDAQ. To learn more about Sequoia Capital visit www.sequoiacap.com.