Trivia 23 of 30
What was the first-ever YouTube video?
YouTube was launched on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, who all met while working together at PayPal (wikipedia.org).
YouTube.com in 2005. Photo: Web Design Museum
Origins of YouTube
Any company that wants to be memorable needs a good origin story. People can’t feel something for a business unless they can relate to it somehow. Having a good origin story, with real people doing real, relatable things, is a great way to develop this connection. Knowing this, YouTube’s co-founders have tried on a few origin stories of their over the years.
According to them, YouTube was inspired by wanting to:
- Share videos of a dinner party they attended.
- Find footage of Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” at Superbowl XXXVIII.
- Find footage of the 2004 Indian tsunami.
- Make a video dating site inspired by Hot or Not.
Actually, that last one is apparently true. The co-founders only changed plans because they couldn’t find enough dating videos. They decided to open up their platform so people could upload anything, which is why YouTube is the way it is today.
“Me at the Zoo”, featuring YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego zoo. This was the very first video uploaded to YouTube. Video: jawed
Sale to Google
Google logo 1999-2010
In October 2006, just 11 months after the domain YouTube.com went live, the company was bought by Google for $1.65 billion. Founders Chen, Hurley, and Karim were 27, 28, and 26 years old respectively at the time.
More interesting facts about YouTube:
- YouTube is the second most visited site on the internet, after Google Search (as of January 2023) (wikipedia.org).
- YouTube has more than 2.5 billion monthly users (as of February 2023) (statista.com)
- YouTube users collectively watch more than 1 billion hours of videos per day (as of February 2017) (blog.youtube).
- As of May 2019, videos were being uploaded at a rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute (visualcapitalist.com).
