Difference Between YouTube.com and YouTu.be
Who doesn’t spend some time streaming videos on the world’s biggest video-sharing website Youtube.com these days? Don’t you? Well, if you’re familiar with it, have you ever observed a small change in the URL of YouTube while watching videos? Notify us in the comment section.
Youtube.com is not the only domain that stays in the address bar every time you look for new videos. There’s another domain that sometimes occupies the seat. Youtu.be, is the one that comes into action for shortening the URL. Confused? To understand it, let’s know something about YouTube first.
Contents
What is YouTube?
It is the biggest video-sharing website and the second largest search engine next to Google that was launched on 14 Feb 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. In Oct 2006, the search engine giant Google bought YouTube by donating a bag of $1.65 billion.
Today, YouTube has more than 2.2 billion+ active users. Over 750+ hours of videos were uploaded to YouTube every minute. Almost 5 billion videos are watched every single day.
This is a never-ending process. In addition to that, daily millions of people join YouTube and tens of thousands of videos go online from every corner of the world. And surprisingly, Google easily manages this flowing data in its data centers until we’re alive.
Can you imagine the amount of data YouTubers have generated all these years? It’s really hard to present the exact figure. So, get into the topic.
YouTube.com vs Youtu.be
Hope you got an idea about YouTube. As we discussed above, daily tens of hundreds of videos were uploaded to YouTube and each one is addressed with a unique URL ranging from the very shortest to the lengthiest one.
YouTube.com vs Youtu.be are the same. Both offer videos and keep you on the same page as YouTube.com. Except for the change in the web address, there is no major difference between YouTube.com vs Youtu.be. But why Youtu.be?
Every video uploaded to YouTube is tagged with a unique URL. It means hundreds of millions of combinations have already been used and new URLs are generated in every fraction of a second. If this continues, the URL of future YouTube videos occupies the total visible space in the address bar.
Do you think people really like lengthy URLs? Of course not because long URLs are difficult to remember and are confusing. Moreover, Google wants a search engine-friendly URL to find, read, and understand. Continue reading to know how search engine giant Google brings this to an end in a smart way.
YouTube.com vs Youtu.be: The Major Difference
Youtube.com is a known website and is famous worldwide. The .com in suffix is a Top Level Domain (TLD). It is most popular and in fact, 53% of all websites use .com as a suffix.
On the other hand Youtu.be is not a TLD. It is a (ccTLD) country code Top Level Domain that is reserved for Belgium. But, it is not only limited to itself and there is no rule that says people of other countries cannot use country-specific domains.
So, some nations use ccTLD to maintain uniqueness and to help the users of the country easily identify the original one. This also lets users instantly reach a website they’re looking for. Like .be there are many ccTLDs available worldwide. Some of them are .ae (Abu Dhabi), .co (Colombia), .hk (Hong Kong), .cn (China), etc.
A short web address has several benefits. Most importantly they’re catchy, easy to remember, and can easily stick in someone’s head. This is one of the reasons behind the reduction of three letters on Youtube.com. Move on to know about the smart technique implemented by Google to get rid of lengthy URLs.
What is Youtu.be?
There is no major difference between Youtube.com and Youtu.be except for the change in domain. Moreover, both will redirect you to the same page YouTube.com. No matter what you stream, both the domains YouTube.com and Youtu.be present your videos. Here, Youtu.be just acts like a URL shortener.
The .com after YouTube is a Top Level Domain (TLD) and the suffix .be in Youtu.be is a country code Top Level Domain (ccTLD), precisely Belgium.
We’ve already discussed that every single video uploaded to YouTube is tagged with a unique URL. It means, hundreds of millions of URL combinations have to be generated every fraction of a second.
Once imagine how many URLs have been used since its launch and how many new URLs have to be generated for future videos. This is a never-ending process. If this continues, the URL of future YouTube videos occupies the total visible space in the address bar.
Here the challenge is, YouTube has to protect itself from domain hacks, provide search engine-friendly URLs, and has to reduce the length of URLs. Therefore, to get rid of all these problems, Google smartly changed the domain suffix and gave a complete refresh to the web addresses. Let’s see what exactly it means.
Most of the video URLs for the domain YouTube.com contain more than 19+ characters after .com. Have a look.
(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQuOzTSv1Vs).
To make it shorter, Google simply added .be in the suffix and turned like this
The web address of both URLs mentioned above are the same and drop you on the same page. But if you observe clearly, the second URL looks very short compared to the first one. And this is how the search engine giant Google acted smartly to overcome the problems in the near future.
vs
youtu.be
Note – The suffix .be is introduced just for reducing the size of the URL. Both Youtube.com and Youtu.be take you to the same page. Youtu.be is not a separate platform and doesn’t redirect you to any third-party websites.
Are Youtu.be Links Safe?
The domains Youtube.com and Youtu.be are the same and keep you on the same page Youtube.com. And the videos that are tagged with .be are introduced just for shortening the URL.
Youtu.be is not a separate platform and doesn’t redirect you to any third-party websites. So you don’t have to worry. The Youtu.be links are safe.
These short URLs make sharing and downloading videos from YouTube easy.
Final Thoughts
Bigger problems finally end up with smaller solutions and that’s what the search engine giant has done. With just a replacement of three letters, all the problems related to URLs have been solved. So guys, Youtu.be is not a separate page and Youtu.be links are safe.
This is the difference between Youtube.com and Youtu.be. Hope your doubts on Youtube.com vs Youtu.be have been solved.
