do YOUTUBE?

Advantages: Very popular, easy to use and navigate

Disadvantages: get in trouble for dodgy content

Founded in February 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim YouTube.com is now one of the most popular websites in the world, In November 2006, within a year of its launch, YouTube was purchased by Google Inc. in one of the most talked-about acquisitions to date.
So you will notice that google video - who was once a competitor now displays youtube videos in Google video search results.

Other sites that are similar to youtube and allow you to put your videos online are veoh.com and www.dailymotion.com, dailymotion is perhaps in someways better than youtube in the fact that they are less strict with what you post, people post virtually anything, registration is also free like youtube's and is only needed if you want to post or to watch a movie that is rated over 18.
A new and upcoming site is stage6.divx's site, but you these are only sharing divx files, (usually movies and copied content) and this site will never rise to the height of youtube.com

Youtube is huge and the most popular site compared to all competitors, they now have a google gadget that allows you to embed videos onto your website, and have youtube searches etc.

---Success through youtube---

People have made a lot of money from youtube, as videos are available and viewed by such a large audience people have risen from nothing to fame. Like the Japanese students who were singing a song and put it on youtube (got several hits) & were given a sponsorship deal by Pepsi and now are filthy rich!
Similarly a band made their video and put it on youtube -( the one with the treadmills ), they never officially published the video but it got extremely famous and now the band are famous.

------Youtube awards-------

The site has been awarded "Best Invention of the Year" by Time magazine and was the first Web site to receive "Entertainer of the Year" by Entertainment Weekly. Both Chad and Steve have been received several prestigious honors and acknowledgements from the business and entertainment communities including: Business 2.0's "50 Most Influential People," GQ's "Men of the Year," and Fortune's "Most Powerful People in Business." They also were prominently featured in Time magazine's "Person of the Year" issue and received credit for largely influencing the publication's unprecedented selection of "you" in a year that YouTube led the digital democracy explosion

---Test Tube---

This is youtube's ideas "incubator." This is where YouTube engineers and developers test out recipes and concoctions that aren't quite fully baked and invite users to tell them how they're coming along
Things currently in test tube are active sharing, audio swap, remixer and streams,
(for information visit youtube.com)

Youtube have recently created youtube tv which allows you to watch youtube videos.
Like dooyoo youtube.com has its own online community
Where they have group videos (videos of a similar nature) and contest winners - Youtube's contents are another way of making money, they may set a theme for people to make a video of, the best one receives a prize.

Youtube continues to make money and you will notice they display google adverts (of sponsors through the adsense scheme)(for extra income)

---press---

As youtube is so popular it gets a lot of media attention and has recently been mentioned in The Washington post, Reuters, new york times, CNN, BBC news and many others.

---bad things---
As its so easy to publish a video onto youtube many people post movies online (usually in parts of films out in the cinema) these are usually deleted within a week as there are several youtube staff that skim through the millions of new videos to find illegal content.

--more---

You may wonder how and why youtube is so rich its because YouTube has struck numerous partnership deals with content providers such as CBS, BBC, Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group, Warner Music Group, NBA, The Sundance Channel and many more.

Interestingly the site utube.com which sell tube and roll form equipment complained and sued youtube saying how they get so many hits due to people miss spelling youtube!
Utube.com declined a $1 million offer for utube.com from youtube.com! Utube were hoping to strip youtube of its domain, but haven't had any luck yet!

Summary: Youtube is the 4th most popular site in the world after yahoo, msn and google