Since its origins in 2005, YouTube has transformed itself from a showcase for amateur videos to one that distributes original content.
It has also enabled the creation of an entirely new profession — YouTube content creator, which can be a very profitable career for some YouTubers around the world.
What was the original purpose of YouTube?
YouTube was originally created as a platform for anyone to post any video content they desired. It was hoped that users could use the site to upload, share, and view content without restriction.
It has since grown to become one of the foremost video distribution sites in the world. Today, many content creators make a decent living by selling ad space before or on videos they create and upload onto the site.
Thanks to things like YouTube's Partner Program and Google's AdSense, a few people can actually create successful careers as YouTubers.
YouTube was founded on Valentine's Day in 2005. It was the brainchild of Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were all former employees of Paypal.
The platform, like so many others in Silicon Valley, began as an angel-funded enterprise with makeshift offices in a garage.
history of youtube first video
Source: jawed/YouTube
According to its founders, the idea was born at a dinner party in San Fransisco, about a year earlier, in 2004. The trio was frustrated by how hard it was, at the time, to find and share video clips online.
“Video, we felt, really wasn’t being addressed on the Internet,” said Chad Hurley in an early interview. “People were collecting video clips on their cell phones … but there was no easy way to share [them].”
In May of 2005, the beta version of YouTube was up on the net, and within a month, the very first video was posted. It was titled, "Me at the Zoo," and was a 19-second long clip posted by Karim himself. The video featured footage of Karim at the San Diego Zoo, talking about elephants and their trunks.
By September of 2005, YouTube had managed to get its first video with one million views. This was a Nike ad that went and gone viral.
This first YouTube viral video was a clip of Brazilian soccer player Ronaldinho receiving a pair of Golden Boots. Nike was also one of the first major companies to embrace YouTube's promotional potential.
The following month, in November of 2005, the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital invested an impressive $3.5 million in the business. Roelof Botha (who also formerly worked for Paypal) joined YouTube's board of directors.Sequoia and Artis Capital Management invested an additional $8 million, in 2006, as the website saw significant growth in its first few months.
Who founded YouTube?
As previously mentioned, YouTube was founded by:
Chad Hurley
Steve Chen
Jawed Karim
All three were working for Paypal at the time of YouTube's founding in 2005.
Chad Hurley studied design at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania prior to joining Ebay's PayPal division after graduating in 1999. At Paypal, he primarily focused on the user experience (UX) of their interface.
Steven Shih Chen was born in 1978 in Taipei, Taiwan. His family emigrated to the U.S. when he was eight years old. Steve left the Illinois Mathematics and Science Academy prior to graduating.
He later attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he graduated in 2002 with a degree in computer science. He would later join Paypal.
Jawed Karim was born in 1979 in Merseburg, East Germany. His father was Bangladeshi, and his mother was German.
After experiencing xenophobia in Germany, his father moved the family to Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1992. Jawed would later study computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, but left prior to graduating.
After dropping out, Jawed would become an early employee of the fledgling Paypal. While at Paypal, he continued his coursework and eventually graduated with a degree in computer science, and went on to earn a master's degree in computer science from Stanford University.
How was YouTube created?
Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim met at Paypal.
The concept of YouTube was inspired, according to Jawed Karim, by videos of Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl, and the devastating tsunami in the Indian Ocean. As a capital-funded startup, the idea for YouTube received an $11.5 million investment from Sequoia Capital in 2005. In February, the domain name was registered in the headquarters above a pizzeria in California. In April, the first-ever video was uploaded by Karim named "Me at the Zoo". After a Beta testing period, the site launched in December 2005, and a Nike commercial became the first video to receive one million views," according to Engadget.
By February of 2004, YouTube's now-famous logo (since changed as of 2017) was registered as a trademark, and the website domain name was also purchased.
The original idea for YouTube was for users to be able to upload videos, introducing themselves, and saying what they were interested in. This didn't really take off, and the co-founders soon pivoted to a more general video sharing site.
How did YouTube get its name?
Unlike a lot of other company names, YouTube's name is actually quite self-explanatory.
"The name “YouTube” is actually pretty straightforward. The “You” represents that the content is user-generated, created by individual users and not the site itself, and “Tube” is a nod toward an older original term for television. Soon after YouTube's URL was registered, it came under immediate attack by another company called Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment. Their website address just happened to be very similar —www.utube.com. They filed a lawsuit against YouTube, which appears to have been unsuccessful. Today that company's URL is www.utubeonline.com.
Since its early days in 2005, YouTube has grown to become a behemoth of the Internet. It is now present in more than 75 countries and available in 61 languages, with hundreds of hours of video content uploaded every minute!
Today, the site has more than one billion users and has become the de facto video sharing platform on the Internet.
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