• by Steve Smith , Staff Writer @popeyesm, August 2, 2011

Where were you in May 2005? As with every other medium that has flourished in the last century and a half, YouTube was the catalyst for an online video energy that had been building for a while. Some say the month YouTube went live, May 2005, may be seen as a turning point that falls into the pantheon of the 1947 World Series, which marked the beginning of that medium's fast rush to household ubiquity.

In a cool infographic at Mashable this week, researcher Lauren Drell and designer Emily Caulfield pulled together the key facts in the short happy life of YouTube. Get ready for those office digital video trivia quizzes.

When did 3D come to You Tube?

No, really? July 2009. That early? 

When did pre-roll advertising start? November 2008? That late? Oh yes, ye of webified memory and attention spans. It was not too long ago when pundits tsk-tasked the 2006 Google purchase of the growing repository of skateboard accidents and karaoke madness. This thing will never monetize, they chortled. In fact, according to this data dump from Mashable, 94 of the top 100 advertisers are using either YouTube of Google's display network. And on the media side, look how far our little UGC cove of pirates has come - from lawsuits and cease and desists over copyrighted property violations to 10,000 partners, including major TV powerhouses Disney and Turner. Now more than 1,000 companies use YouTube's content ID to track and manage any copyrighted material of theirs uploaded to the system. One of the ways a rights holder can act when their property is identified as theirs under Content ID is to monetize it rather than ban it. Mashable says that more than a third of YouTube's monetized video views are now coming from property owners using Content ID.

But for all of its relatively new good relations with traditional media, the video network is driven primarily by uploaders like you. Mashable says that more video gets uploaded to the site's servers every 60 days than CBS, NBC and ABC created over 60 years.

Thirteen million hours of video were uploaded in 2010.

Or as Springsteen would snark, 13 million choices, and not a damn thing on.