by Samuel Reid

Created on: January 02, 2011

YouTube has only been running for a few years, and yet it has quickly become the most popular and used website for video hosting, streaming and watching. The fact that Google owns the site has also aided in this rise to fame. YouTube is a user-friendly, accessible website for your videos.

To start off with, YouTube allows users to do a multitude of things on the website such as:

1. Watching videos free
2. Uploading videos free
3. Subscribing to other users to be notified when a new video is uploaded by that user
4. Adding other users as friends so that you can see their activity
5. Adding videos to your favourites so that you can easily view them again

The best bit is, people don't even need to register to be able to watch videos online.

Registration to the website is easy, fast, and free. Once done, users can subscribe to channels, upload their own videos and comment on other videos easily. The commenting system is designed so that spam comments can be quickly found and blocked, making the comments better and easier for the submitter of the video to understand (constructive criticisms never hurt anybody). Video reviews can be quickly made if a user has a webcam and Flash software, so asking users to make videos about a certain topic, or just telling people what your opinion about the video is, can be made in a stronger way.

Next is uploading. Once users are registered and logged in, they can easily go to the upload menu to upload their new video. It's as simple as clicking upload, finding the video (or recording one using webcam), and changing the setting for the video while it uploads. Videos take around a day to become public after uploading whilst the YouTube company registers and renders the video.

Another bonus to YouTube is the fact that it is beneficial to people's careers if they are good enough. Some YouTube users are noticed by production companies and invited to make short films, or are given a career in continuing their video series. Some YouTubers who publish videos of them singing, playing music etc. are 'discovered' by music/recording companies (does the name Justin Bieber ring a bell?) and contracted for professional music careers.

The only negative thing about YouTube is how they sometimes change the layout of the website without giving any warning to users, and this is not always for the better. It may take some time for users to adapt to these changes, but once used to it, the site is just as user-friendly as ever.

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