YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steven Chen, and Jawed Karim, former employees of PayPal, an online commerce website. They registered the domain name in February 2005. It was officially launched in December of that year.
In October 2006, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in stocks, just 18 months after YouTube’s creation. Karim received $66 million in Google stock, Chen received $310 million, and Hurley received $334 million.
The first month after its creation, YouTube had three million visitors. The number of visitors tripled by the third month (February 2006), and then tripled again by July to 30 million visitors. By the end of the site’s first year, the number of visitors reached over 38 million.
YouTube is the second-largest search engine after Google (bigger than Bing, Yahoo!, and Ask combined).
YouTube’s viewers are approximately 44 percent female and 56 percent male. Most viewers are 12-17 years old.
In 2007, it was estimated that YouTube used as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000.
The name “YouTube” and its motto “Broadcast Yourself” reflect the founders’ hope that anyone could use the site freely.
YouTube has become such a cultural phenomenon that a college course was devoted to it. In 2007, Pitzer College in California offered a course called ‘Learning from YouTube’. The teacher wanted students to think about YouTube’s place in society.
The very first video-sharing website was ShareYourWorld.com, which was started in1997. However, because technology at the time was not good enough for sending and watching videos over the Internet, it soon went out of business.
In September 2005, Brazilian soccer star Ronaldinho’s Nike ad ‘Touch of gold’ became the first YouTube video to be viewed 1 million times.
