Will All of Us Get Our 15 Minutes On a YouTube Video?

Wall Street Journal, August 30, 2006; Page B1

If the data from YouTube are to believed, the world has a lot of explaining to do. The video-sharing site doesn't make public much of the information it has about itself, such as a breakdown of the nationalities of its registered users. But it's possible to piece together...

Headline facts from this article (Steve Rubel)

• In a single month the number of videos on the site grew 20% to 6.1 million
• YouTube has some 45 terabytes of videos
• Video views reached 1.73 billion
• 70% of YouTube's registered users are American, roughly 50% are under 20
• The total time people spent watching YouTube since it started last year is 9,305 years

What do you get fo $1.6bn?

By John Harris, The Guardian, Weds Oct 11

A year after it was launched, YouTube is being sold for almost £900m. But what is Google buying? The world's biggest collection of pop videos and silly home movies - or something that could change the face of policing, politics and the web?