YouTube’s one billion - Changing the world

The phenomenal success of YouTube — 1bn visitors a month — is as good a way as any to try to understand how our world is changing.

That so many people will use it to look at everything from how to make a proper Victoria sponge — thanks Delia — to tie a perfection loop knot, shows how it can be relevant to so many lives.

That the YouTube top five are five pop songs shows how music delivery to consumers has changed utterly — just as ebooks have changed the world of books forever.

This phenomenon hints too at how nearly every human interaction — shopping, financial services, property sales and job opportunities, books and newspapers, not to mention education — will migrate towards the web in a way we have yet to fully understand, much less appreciate.