Who Founded YouTube?
YouTube is an American company having its headquarters in San Bruno, California. The company, through its website, allows users to share videos, rate the videos, view the videos, add to playlist, report, and to subscribe to other users on the website. There are numerous corporate media and user-generated videos on YouTube, which include TV shows, video clips, music videos, audio recordings, short and long documentary films, live streams, movie trailers, educational videos, short blogging videos among other content. Individuals upload most of the content on YouTube, but corporate entities such as BBC, CBS, Hulu, and Vevo, among others, offer part of their material content through YouTube because they have a partnership program with YouTube. Users who are not registered on YouTube can only watch videos, and registered users can upload and add a comment to an unlimited number of videos. Videos that are considered potentially inappropriate could only be accessed by registered users who affirm they are above 18 years of age.
The Founders Of YouTube
YouTube was founded by Jawed Karim, Steve Chen, and Chad Hurley in 2005. The three were former employees of PayPal, and in 2004 they realized there was no single location on the internet where videos could be shared. Several years later, Karim said that it was the incident of the Janet Jackson Super Bowl and the tsunami in December 2004 that triggered the idea of creating a place where people could share videos. Karim and Chen had studied computer science at the University of Illinois at Urbana, and Hurley had studied design at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. According to Hurley and Chen, YouTube’s original idea was to create a video version of an online dating service, which was inspired by the website Hot or Not. They said the idea was later changed because it was not easy to find enough dating videos, and the site was changed to accept uploads of any video.
Growth Of YouTube
Between 2005 and 2006, YouTube was founded as a technology startup with venture capital of $11.5 million from Sequoia Capital and $8 million from Artist Capital Management. Its initial headquarters was in San Mateo, California. Its domain name became live on February 14, 2005. The first video on YouTube was uploaded on April 23, 2005, titled “Me at the zoo” featuring Jawed Karim when he was at San Diego Zoo. The video is still on YouTube. The Nike advertisement that featured Ronaldinho in November 2005 was the first video to attain 1 million views. The site was officially launched on December 15, 2005, during which time it was receiving approximately 8 million views each day. By July 2006, about 65,000 new videos were being uploaded on YouTube each day, and there were approximately 100 million views per day. In November 2006, YouTube was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion, and it is now one of the subsidiaries of Google.
Interesting Facts About YouTube
As of 2019, about 1.3 billion people use YouTube, and about 300 hours of videos are uploaded every minute. Each day about 5 billion videos are watched around the world, and there are about 30 million visitors each day.
