YouTube’s founding date was February 15, 2005. Its founders were Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, three early employees of PayPal. It was their next project after Ebay purchased Paypal and left the three with a windfall. On October 9, 2006, YouTube was purchased by Google for $1.65 billion. The name is a reference to the cathode ray tube that was the main component in televisions until the early 2010s. A common nickname for TV during the CRT era was “The Tube.”
YouTube was not the first video-sharing site on the Internet. Vimeo launched in November 2004, though that site remained a side project of its developers from CollegeHumor so it never attained Youtube’s success.
Youtube origin stories
A common story is that Hurley and Chen developed the idea for YouTube during the early months of 2005, after they wanted to share videos they had taken at a dinner party at Chen’s apartment in San Francisco. Karim did not attend the party and denied that it had occurred. While neither confirming nor denying the story, Chen called it very digestible marketing.
Karim said the inspiration for YouTube came from the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show controversy and the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. The controversy happened when Justin Timberlake briefly exposed Janet Jackson’s breast during the halftime show. Karim could not easily find video clips of either online, which gave him the idea for a video-sharing site.
Hurley and Chen said their original idea was a video version of an online dating service influenced by the website Hot or Not. They posted on Craigslist offering attractive women $100 to upload videos of themselves to YouTube. When they couldn’t find enough dating videos, they decided to accept uploads of any video.
Preparing for launch
In February 2005, the company activated www.youtube.com. The first video went live on April 23, 2005. Titled “Me at the zoo”, it shows co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. You can still view it on the site. The same day, Youtube launched a public beta.
Between November 2005 and April 2006, Youtube raised money from various venture capital funds, including Sequoia Capital and Artis Capital Management. YouTube’s early headquarters was in San Mateo, California, situated above a pizzeria and a Japanese restaurant.
By November 2005, a Nike ad featuring Brazillian football great Ronaldinho became the first video to reach one million total views. The site launched officially on December 15, 2005, by which time the site was receiving 8 million views a day. Initially, clips had a limit of 100 megabytes in size, which is as little as 30 seconds of footage.
Early growth of Youtube
The week of YouTube’s launch, NBC’s Saturday Night Live ran a skit “Lazy Sunday” by The Lonely Island. It became an early viral video, helping establish The Lonely Island as stars and YouTube as an important website. Unofficial uploads of the skit to drew in more than five million collective views by February 2006 before NBC requested their removal citing copyright concerns. The duplicate uploads of the skit helped popularize YouTube’s reach and led to the upload of more third-party content. Eventually, it led to copyright holders uploading their content to Youtube so they could monetize it.
The site grew rapidly. In July 2006, Youtube announced more than 65,000 new videos were being uploaded every day and the site was receiving 100 million video views per day. Early on a lot of it was videos like ex-MLB pitcher Mark Littell demonstrating protective sports equipment with a lot of bravado. But over time, more the variety of content increased.
The choice of the name www.youtube.com led to problems for a similarly named website, www.utube.com, that had nothing to do with online video. That site’s owner, Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment, filed a lawsuit against YouTube in November 2006, after being regularly overloaded by people looking for YouTube. Universal Tube subsequently changed its website to www.utubeonline.com.
During Youtube’s early days, the Pure Digital Flip camera, released May 1, 2006, was a popular camera for recording Youtube footage due to its low price and ease of use.
Google buyout
A mere 602 days after Youtube’s founding date, on October 9, 2006, Google announced that they had acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock. The deal closed November 13, 2006.
Today it is the second-most-visited website in the world, after Google Search, making Youtube one of Google’s most impactful acquisitions. In January 2024, YouTube had more than 2.7 billion monthly active users, who collectively watched more than one billion hours of videos every day.
David Farquhar is a computer security professional, entrepreneur, and author. He has written professionally about computers since 1991, so he was writing about retro computers when they were still new. He has been working in IT professionally since 1994 and has specialized in vulnerability management since 2013. He holds Security+ and CISSP certifications. Today he blogs five times a week, mostly about retro computers and retro gaming covering the time period from 1975 to 2000.
Wished you would start posting about toy trains again. I always looked forward to your many interesting posts about various toy trains, esp. O-Gauge Marx and Lionel.
I appreciate that. Last summer I had a couple of people decide to hassle me about something I said about Marx trains and I just decided I needed to take a break from writing about trains after 20 years of it. Someday I’ll get the itch again, I’m sure.
The cultural impact of YouTube has been absolutely astonishing. Last year it became the second most-watched content service in the UK, just behind the BBC, and it’s absolutely the first choice for children. I personally spend far more time watching it than any broadcast channel or streaming service.
https://www.tvbeurope.com/media-consumption/ofcom-youtube-overtakes-itv-to-become-uks-second-most-watched-service
I love the fact that you can find virtually any niche interest catered for on the platform. Rugby fan, watch collector, DIY enthusiast, history buff or coffee nerd, you’ll always find something to watch. But the consequence is a fragmenting audience and a decaying national conversation.
As a teenager in the 90s, I’d always be chatting to my school friends about the most recent episode of Red Dwarf or Harry Enfield or the Fast Show (comedy staples at the time), which we would have all watched at the same time. My own children don’t have any similar common points of cultural reference with their peers, unless you count weird internet memes.