Youtube | featured news

Viral videos are hits on the Web, and now they can help propel a song to the top of the Billboard charts. Billboard has announced that U.S. YouTube data is now one of the factors when ranking Hot 100 songs and songs on its other charts.

A Cairo court on Saturday ordered the government to block access to the video-sharing website YouTube for 30 days for carrying an anti-Islam film that caused deadly riots across the world.

A child watching videos on YouTube is an average of three clicks away from potentially disturbing adult content, according to a recent study released by British digital security firm Kaspersky Lab.

With prince of invisible equestrian sports and YouTube page views (Psy), now semi-disgraced, the Internet has decided to anoint its next silly video star.

PSY’s ubiquitious Gangnam Style video just passed Justin Bieber’s Baby as the most viewed YouTube video ever. It has currently clocked 803,761,928 views. According to ChannelMeter, Gangnam Style had its best day ever on Oct. 28, when the video was viewed 24,563,506 times. Since it premiered 132 days ago, it has averaged 6.1 million daily views. ChannelMeter now predicts Gangam Style will be the first video in history to reach 1 billion views on Dec. 16, 2012.

Part of the enduring appeal of YouTube is the sheer random nature of it all -- the way videos of a South Korean pop song or a doped-up kid after a dentist visit can go from obscure to internationally known in a matter of days. But increasingly, the Web's leading video site has also been working to become the Internet's cable provider, mixing channels of its own original content, often in partnership with established stars, into the mix.

Hey, YouTubers! Have you danced your fill to "Gangnam Style"? Have you seen enough versions of "Call Me Maybe"? Now video grazers can check out a brand-new YouTube channel that promises to be as amusing as any cat on a skateboard but also to engage you with ideas for changing the world. TakePart TV, launching Tuesday, is a digital home for what the network has termed "clever, eye-opening and optimistic content around big issues that face our planet." The target audience is millennials ranging from teenage to 30.

Google Inc.'s head of operations in Brazil was detained by the country's federal police Wednesday after the company failed to heed a judge's order to take down YouTube videos that the court ruled violate Brazilian electoral law....

An actress who appears in a clip of an anti-Muslim film blamed for causing deadly violence in the Middle East says she will continue to press to get YouTube to pull the trailer. A judge denied Cindy Lee Garcia's request Thursday that he order the clip removed. Superior Court Judge Luis Lavin says he rejected the request in part because Garcia hadn't served the film's producer with a copy of a lawsuit demanding its removal.

Google Inc rejected a request by the White House on Friday to reconsider its decision to keep online a controversial YouTube movie clip that has ignited anti-American protests in the Middle East... "We've restricted access to it in countries where it is illegal such as India and Indonesia, as well as in Libya and Egypt, given the very sensitive situations in these two countries," the company said. "This approach is entirely consistent with principles we first laid out in 2007."