This week marks the 10th anniversary of the first video upload to YouTube, a 19-second work of art showing one of the company’s founders describing an elephant at the San Diego Zoo. Since that day in 2005, 17 million people with too much time on their hands have viewed that video.

Google Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) paid $1.65 billion in Google bucks (stock) for the fledgling company in October 2006, by far the most Google had ever paid for an acquisition to that point — and it has paid off handsomely. Would that the Motorola acquisition ($12.5 billion) had done even half as well.

In February of this year, a total of nearly 145 million Americans watched a YouTube video on a desktop or laptop PC. That is equal to about 46% of the entire population.

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In terms of net video advertising revenue, an estimate by research firm eMarketer pegged YouTube’s 2014 market share at 18.9%, growing to 19.4% in 2015. That is just video ads, not static ads, and the total is net of payments to video content producers. While neither Google nor its advertisers will say for sure how much Google pays out to content producers, most estimates fall around 55%.

U.S. digital video advertising revenue is expected to rise from $5.81 billion in 2014 to $7.77 billion this year and $14.38 billion by 2019. YouTube is expected to capture $1.55 billion in 2015 and $1.99 billion in 2017, out of an annual total of $11.25 billion.

YouTube claims more than 1 billion users worldwide, who watch hundreds of millions of hours of video every day, generating billions of views. Every minute of the day, 300 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube.

According to the YouTube statistics page, more than a million advertisers use Google ad platforms, and the top YouTube creators were found to be more popular than mainstream celebrities among U.S. teenagers. Reaching a young audience practically requires a YouTube presence, and advertisers know it.

According to tracking site Social Blade, the top YouTube channel based on the Social Blade’s ranking methodology is DisneyCollectorBR, with more than 4 million subscribers and estimated monthly revenues of $108,000 to $1.7 million. The TaylorSwiftVEVO channel, the fifth-most popular YouTube channel, claims more than 12 million subscribers and estimated monthly revenues of $75,000 to $1.2 million.

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