• Home
• /
• Tech

YouTube: A decade of viewing pleasure

The Middle East and North Africa region is No.2 in the world in terms of video views a day at over 310 million, ranking it ahead of Brazil and behind only the United States.

Hey, youtube just turned 10!

But depending on where you look at it — or, more specifically, how often you’ve used it — it may seem either it’s been too long or just like yesterday. Personally, having used it a lot (haven’t all of us done that?), it seems like the world’s largest video-sharing site has been there forever; while YouTube was indeed officially launched in November 2005, the general public was offered a beta-test site in May of that year.

Anyway, our friends at YouTube decided to exclusively share some tips and tricks for our readers — some of which you may already know, some of which you may not have a clue that it existed.

But before that, Khaleej Times took time out to know some juicy facts and figures about YouTube, specifically here in the region.

>>     The Middle East and North Africa region is No.2 in the world in terms of video views a day at over 310 million, ranking it ahead of Brazil and behind only the United States; that’s also 14.5 million watch hours every single day. In Saudi Arabia alone, the average Internet user watched three times as much videos daily versus the average user in the US.

>>     Two hours of YouTube videos are uploaded in the Mena per minute. In terms of playback, Saudi Arabia leads the pack for most followed by Egypt, Morocco and the UAE.

>>     The YouTube partnership programme was launched in the Mena in 2013 and now includes 12 countries — the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia, Yemen, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and Oman. The site also has 13 local domains in the region — those mentioned above plus Lebanon. YouTube has over 200,000 partners in the Mena.

>>     Saudi Arabia and the UAE lead regionally and globally with 50 per cent and 40 per cent, respectively, of all views originating from mobile devices. According to Ipsos’ 2014 report, YouTube is the third most-used app among smartphone users in the UAE, and is also in the top 10 most-used apps in terms of time spent per day.

 

Now, for the better part: YouTube tips and tricks:

>>     Save videos to Watch Later: You don’t need to look over your shoulder anymore if you are watching YouTube videos during work hours. Add a video to Watch Later by tapping the clock icon on video thumbnails, or through the “Add to” icon under the video on the watch page.

>>     Share a video from a certain time stamp: Deep-linking to a specific part of a YouTube video is really easy, and there are two ways you can share a video from a certain time stamp: you can pause the video, do a right click and select “Get the video URL at the right time”, or you can add the time stamp to the end of the URL — for example, to start at the one-minute, 30-second mark, just add &t=1m30s.

>>     Listen to full albums on YouTube: By searching for #artistname, you will get their topic pages. Go ahead and give it a try. Now.

>>     Control YouTube on a TV with your phone: You can connect over Wi-Fi or manually pair your TV with your second device.

>>     Keyboard shortcuts: While watching a video, you can press K to pause or play; J to rewind 10 seconds; L to fast-forward 10 seconds or M to mute.

>>     Keywords searching to help you find just what you are looking for: Add quotation marks to search for a specific term, with plus or minus signs to include or omit results; add “allintitle” in the search box before the keywords, in order to make sure that the results will include all the keywords you searched for in the title; add “HD” to your search query to get high-definition results; you can also add “3D” for three-dimensional content; add “channel” or “playlist” to your search query.

>>     Change the size and resolution of videos: YouTube is offered in several quality and size formats. You can choose to watch videos in 360p all the way up to 4K, by selecting in the video quality pulldown menu.

>>     Watch and upload 360-degree videos: You can watch 360-degree videos on the YouTube app for Android by moving the phone or tablet around to see all the different angles while the video plays.

>>     Customise your videos with Video Editor: You can trim your videos to custom lengths, or add royalty-free music from the Audio Library.

>>     Manage your channel on the go with the Creator Studio mobile app for iOS and Android. Check out your latest stats, respond to comments, and get notifications so you can stay connected from anywhere.

>>     Go to www.youtube.com/analytics to see a bunch of stats on your uploaded videos, like which countries love your videos the most or if people watch your videos until the end.

You can also get an early preview of some new features being tested at TestTube, such as the redesigned YouTube player.

Looks like we’ll be padding more to those stats above, huh?

— alvin@khaleejtimes.com