It started with apartment dinner
In February 14, 2005, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim founded and launched YouTube in San Mateo California, on the second floor of a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant building. The idea for creating YouTube happened when Hurley and Chen experienced difficulty in sharing videos from an apartment dinner they did at Chen's house in San Francisco in 2005. Karim also thought of the benefits of having an online video platform when he was trying to find video clips of the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami, and videos of the Super Bowl 38th half time show. YouTube began as a venture capital funded tech startup, where the company was able to raise money from two big investors, $11.5 million from Sequoia Capital, and $8 million from Artis Capital Management.
Me at the zoo
After activating www.youtube.com in 2005, Karim uploaded the first ever YouTube video on April 23, 2005, titled Me at the zoo, where it shows the co-founder talking at a zoo in San Diego. In November of the same year, a Nike ad featuring Ronaldhino became the first video to reach one million total views, leading to the platform receiving a daily average of 8 million views per day. On October 2006, 18 months after its official launch, YouTube was bought by Google for $1.65 billion, expanding the site's business model from ad revenues alone, to offering paid content such as movies and exclusive contents produced by YouTube. YouTube also created the Google Adsense program, where creators can earn money by uploading videos, generating revenue for the platform and for themselves.
PayPal before YouTube
Hurley, Chen and Karim were early employees of PayPal, which left them a large amount of money after the company was bought by eBay in October 2002. Before becoming YouTube's first CEO, Hurley worked in eBay's PayPal division where one of his tasks involved designing the original PayPal logo. Chen also became YouTube's first Chief Technological Officer, from being an experienced software engineer at PayPal, after attending the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he studied computer science for four years. Karim, the first person to upload a video on the site, acted as an adviser to YouTube after it's launch, prioritising his studies at Stanford at that time, where he earned his Master's degree in computer science, a few years later.
Second biggest social media platform
As of today, YouTube's main categories are music videos, video clips, news, short films, documentaries, vlogs and so much more. Most content is uploaded by individuals, including collaborations between other YouTubers and corporate sponsors. As of November 2020, YouTube reserves the right to monetize any video that is deemed advertiser-friendly on the platform, even if the creator is not yet a member of the YouTube Partner Program. As of 2022, YouTube has over 2.6 billion monthly active users, with 62% of those users accessing the platform daily, becoming the second biggest social media platform in the world next to Facebook.
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