Fun YouTube Secrets

Everyone loves YouTube. I know I do. You can find just about anything you ever wanted to watch. Here are a few jaw-dropping stats for you.

• 6 billion hours of video are watched every month on YouTube; that’s about an hour of video for everyone in the world.

• Every minute, over 100 hours of video are uploaded.

• YouTube is available in 61 countries and 61 languages.

I watch YouTube videos every day; you could call me a YouTube junkie! Maybe I listen to a song I can’t find anywhere. You can learn how to skin and filet a catfish, or just watch some sports bloopers. As popular as YouTube is, I find myself learning new things about the site every day. Today I’ll share some of the fun secrets I've found. Some you may know; others might surprise you.

Sharing a video – I know this one is probably the most obvious to you avid YouTubers, but for those that aren't, it's pretty simple to share a video. Under every video there is a share button. If you click on that button, you can share a video several different ways. You can click on any icon for a social media site and login— Presto!, your video is shared. You can also copy the link directly under those icons and paste it to social media, word document, or email to provide a link to that video. You can also embed a video on a website really easily by clicking on the embed tab then copy the string of text and pasting it on your page. YouTube has taken all the work out of it: all you have to do is copy and paste. Look below at the embedded video on this article.

Play video in slow motion – Did you know you can watch any YouTube video in slow motion? Just hold down the space bar and the video will start to play at a much slower speed. Just hitting the spacebar without holding it will pause the video; hitting it again will start it playing again.

Keyboard shortcut – Besides hitting the space to pause, play, and slow your video, you can also use the left arrow key to rewind or the right arrow key to fast forward. The up and down arrow keys control the volume.

Use only your keyboard – YouTube has a feature called Lean Back. This allows you to control everything with your keyboard. The site has a interface that allows you to search for video using nothing but your arrow and enter keys. There also a sidebar on this site that lets you look at specific topics like sports, gaming, music, news, comedy and much more. Just click here to try it out.

Most popular videos – This is one of the best ways to find the best videos on YouTube. This chart system shows videos based on the amount of views, ratings and comments. It’s the easiest way to find the latest videos by letting other people do all the work of filtering through millions of videos to find the best. Click here to get to the chart page.

Play the Snake Game – This is a great feature that not many people know about. The Snake Game is a simple and fun computer game that has been around since 1970; it even has a Wikipedia entry. I played this for hours years ago, and it was a fun surprise to find it embedded into YouTube. This comes in handy if a video is taking a while to load because your Internet is acting funny. While a video is playing or paused simply hold the left arrow key down for a second then hit the up arrow. This will activate the game on the video screen, and you see the dotted snake moving across the screen and you control it with the arrow keys.

These are just a few of my favorite tricks on YouTube. There are plenty of others. Have you learned any favorite YouTube tricks? Let us know below!