Frequently Asked Questions
- What is the Youtube story? http://youtube.com/t/about
- Where is YouTube located?We are located in San Bruno, California
10 miles South of San Francisco
30 miles North of Mountain View, Google’s headquarters.
- How does YouTube make money?YouTube generates revenue through advertising on the site.
That advertising comes in many formats including:
- * Ad on the homepage which run everyday
- * General display and text ads placed next to search results
- * InVideo ads and other ads run against certain partner videos
- * Contests sponsored by brand advertisers
- What are the YouTube features? The main focus of YouTube is helping users discover new video content and flow through our community in a natural way based on the content they enjoy the most. We believe that building more ease of use and discovery features into the experience will help our community further enjoy our service. There are many features currently on the site including, personal profile pages, called Channels (users can save favorite videos, subscribe to other users, create playlists and more), search, categories and specialized areas on the site like YouChoose 08 and Fashion Week 360. Users can also sample new features before they are released on the site through Test Tube.
- What’s it like to work at YouTube?Here in San Bruno, we thrive on the same culture Google made famous in Mountain View. We are a community of bright, inspiring and talented people who work in a relaxed but focused professional environment, with access to an amazing pool of computing resources and data that help us solve intellectually challenging and wide-ranging problems.
- What kind of skills does YouTube look for when hiring? Strong coders, good communication and interpersonal skills, team-oriented, results-oriented, adaptive, proactive, willing to take ownership, good work ethic, fun, thrives in flat organization and flexible.
- What are the recent milestones in YouTube’s history?
- Oprah Winfrey ShowOn November 6, YouTube founders Chad and Steve appeared on the Oprah Winfrey show with some of the sites most popular users. Chad and Steve demonstrated the ease of using and navigating YouTube and each of the users had a chance to talk about how their YouTube experience has changed their life. The show prompted Oprah to start her own YouTube channel in which she shares show highlights, behind the scenes footage and more. This was a great honor for Chad, Steve and the company.
- Non-profit YouTube launched its Non-Profit Program as a part of the company’s 2007 and 2008 Clinton Global Initiative commitment. This program enables nonprofit organizations (in the U.S. those with 501c3 tax filing status) that register for the program to receive a free nonprofit specific YouTube channel where they can upload footage of their work, public service announcements, calls to action and more. The channel will also allow them to collect donations with no processing costs using the newly launched Google Checkout for Non-Profits.
- Democratic and Republican debates with CNN For the first time in presidential debate history, user-generated video drove two debates. On July 23, for the Democratic Debates and then again on November 28 for the Republican Debates, the presidential candidates answered questions provided by YouTube users through video. These events shattered the mold of traditional debates and ushered in the new generation of politics.
- Internationalization YouTube has launched localized sites in 19 countries (including the U.S.). Each localized site has begun developing communities and rising up stars.
- What are the various engineering teams at YouTube?
- Content Partners Our team builds scalable platform for partners to upload, manage, promote, monetize and get detailed marketing data on their videos.
- Monetization We are focused on building solutions to support monetization efforts at YouTube. This deals with monetizing partner content, user generated content, the site itself through click-to-play ads, and promotions that push traffic to our partner’s valued content.
- Claim Your Content YouTube is working to revolutionize the way media companies do business, and CYC is our platform for making those relationships work. While we ask media companies to upload videos and program them, we also seek broad licenses to all the uploads we get from our user community which contain copyrighted material. This team has the interesting challenge of enticing a long-established business into a new business model, and in creating the world’s largest copyright database. Our team implements functionalities to automatically and manually identify content and attribute it to its owner, then apply the content owner’s policy: Block, Ad revenue share or simply Track for marketing purpose.
- Core Product The Core Product team works on just about everything you see on www.youtube.com. Our charter is to build features that keep our users happy, engaged and watching videos - lots and lots of videos. We’re focused on providing the most comprehensive video product and feature set available with the best possible user experience. Our current projects include such things as recommendations, subscriptions, online video editing, integrated chat & video viewing and interest based sub communities.
- Internal Tools We’re the back-end that keeps the front-end going. Our team owns or integrates with the internal tools used by our Advertising, Sales, Editorial, and Support teams to manage new (video) and traditional (display & text) ads, keep customers happy, and keep interesting videos upfront and center on the youtube.com website. If you’re interested in advertising (incl. creating new types of advertising for a video world), keeping the bad stuff off our site (e.g., porn, graphic violence), keeping the good stuff on it ( e.g., Featured & Director’s Videos), and helping everyday users and content partners to better schedule and promote their content on youtube.com, come talk with us!
- R&D, Analytics and Fraud Like data analysis, AI, building and implementing models? Come talk to us. The R&D team is focused on building systems that help users find new interesting videos, discover patterns in the video views to promote content and of course, stopping those pesky fraudsters from gaming the site for fame and fortune.
- Syndication, Distribution and Mobile The Syndication and Distribution team is focused on bringing YouTube to any place people are watching or creating video - mobile, TV, other websites, devices, heck even the in-flight entertainment on Jet Blue. For online distribution, projects include evolving the embedded YouTube player and gadget strategy so that YouTube spreads even further across the web worldwide. For mobile we’re launching a WAP site and a client app so you can have the full YouTube experience wherever you are. And TV - forget 500 channels