Ten years ago this Saturday saw the launch of the beta version of YouTube. The service was created by three former PayPal employees in February 2005 and in those ten years the site has produced some amazing statistics.

1. The first video uploaded to YouTube was just 19 seconds long.
2. The number of hours people spend watching videos on YouTube each month is increasing 50% year on year with people watching hundreds of millions of hours of content and logging more than 2 billion views every day.
3. Five years ago over 24 hours of video was being uploaded to the site every minute. By last year this had increased to 300 hours of video every minute.
4. YouTube was bought by Google in October 2006 for $1.65 billion. YouTube is now the fastest growing search engine in the world and its videos can be part of Google’s search engine results, leading to exposure on one of the few sites that gets more traffic than YouTube itself.
5. Half of YouTube views are on mobile devices.
6. Cisco have predicted that online video users will reach 1.5 billion in 2016. They also predict that in 2016 55% of all internet traffic will be video related.
7. Social Media Examiner has reported that 76% of marketers plan to add video to their sites. This makes it a higher priority for them than integrating Facebook, Twitter and blog posts.
8. Webdam have reported that videos on landing pages increased conversions by 86%.
9. It’s not just a place to post videos. You can use a YouTube channel as a basis for a social network where people subscribe so they know when to return to see your newest content. This means they could be finding out about your latest offers.
10. With so many people uploading videos on the most popular content the depth of relevant videos has greatly improved. These days it’s likely you’ll find a number of videos on any topic. Just five years ago results were much more haphazard. Checking my notes from back then I see that after  watching a video on how to put an opt-in form on a blog YouTube suggested I watch: three music videos, including the official Lady Gaga video for Telephone, a vlog about having a son with ginger hair, and a video of a fight between a porcupine and a lion. Today I repeated this search, chose the first video and every alternative video presented down the right hand side was related to setting up an optin/squeeze page.

The bottom line is if you want to have an online presence, but you’re not planning to have a channel on YouTube, you are probably handing an enormous advantage to your competition, and this is only going to become more true in the next ten years.