YouTube turns five - NZ's top 10 vids

NZ'S MOST WATCHED YOUTUBE VIDEOS

1. Baby Dancing to Beyonce (11.7 million views globally)

2. Flight of the Conchords Ep 4 If You're Into It (11 million views globally)

3. Flight of the Conchords Ep 3 Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros (9.8 million views globally)

4. Lamb of God - Laid to Rest (8 million views globally)

5. aerobatics by 747 (6.9 million views globally)

6. 720 DUNK!! (6.5 million views globally)

7. Bare essentials of safety from Air New Zealand (5.3 million views globally)

8. Kings Of Leon - Use Somebody (5 million views globally)

9. Mt Eden Dubstep (HD) - Sierra Leone (5 million views globally)

10. Air New Zealand staff have nothing to hide (4.9 million views globally)

Five years ago, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim registered the domain name youtube.com - on Valentine's Day, to be precise. And five years ago this week, the first video was uploaded to youtube.com. Posted by Karim, it features San Diego Zoo's elephant enclosure and the revelation that elephants have "really, really long trunks".

Today the site boasts more than a billion views each day. On average, people watch YouTube for 10 to 15 minutes a day, and 24 hours' worth of content is uploaded to it every minute. The only bigger websites in the world are Facebook and parent company Google, which bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006.

"When we hit a million views a day we thought that was huge," Hurley told the Sunday Telegraph.

"We thought the graph would level off at 30m views a day.

"Obviously we were able to blow through that pretty quickly, so we weren't very good at estimating growth. When we started hitting those numbers and started building momentum we realised that this was much bigger than we had planned for."

In that time, YouTube has made stars of ordinary citizens, from lightsaber-wielding teens to sneezing pandas.

It hasn't all been a downhill ride, however. YouTube has been plagued by copyright issues, thanks to people posting items like music and movie clips online.

The company is currently being sued by Viacom, which owns Nickelodeon, MTV and Comedy Central, over unauthorised postings of its material. YouTube, however, says it has a policy of removing videos which breach copyright. In court filings, it claims Viacom in fact uploaded its own material.

But the site ultimately remains dominated by user-generated content - the most watched clip in New Zealand is a baby in diapers dancing to Beyonce's Single Ladies, with almost 12 million views. Among other popular videos: one boy's post-dentist-visit ramblings and a couple's wedding dance with a twist.