The History of YouTube: the beginnings of the biggest video platform in the world
YouTube is one of the largest and most popular video distribution platforms on the Internet. It has more than 4 billion hours worth of video viewers every month, and an estimated 500 hours of video content are uploaded to YouTube every passing minute.
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 You Tubers 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
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Thanks to things like YouTube's Partner Program and Google's Ad Sense, a few people can actually create successful careers as You Tubers.
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 Pay pal.
The platform, like so many others in Silicon Valley, began as an angel-funded enterprise with makeshift offices in a garage.
According to its founders, the idea was born at a dinner party in San Francisco, 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.
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