HISTORY's Moment in Media: YouTube's Origin Story -- From Dating Site to Video Giant

A more polished version of the story apparently developed after the fact with help from a PR agency describes Karim searching for but finding no way to access videos of two major news events from the previous year Janet Jackson39s Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction and the devastating tsunami in Indonesia In another Hurley and Chen were searching for a way to share some videos from a dinner partyWhichever of these versions is true or most true the innovation was a site on which individual users could easily upload and share videos without needing to download the clip to their own computers Almost immediately the idea shifted to simply posting videos of anything Indeed the first post to the nascent site came from one of the founders in April 2005 18 seconds of Karim standing in front of elephants at the San Diego Zoo and talking about their quotreally really really long trunksquot It39s still live on the site known affectionately as quotMe at the ZooquotThe next month the site launched to the public although still in beta A few months after that the highprofile Silicon Valley VC firm Sequoia Capital invested giving the new company credibility Hurley Chen and Karim had worked at PayPal and the Sequoia partner who did the deal Roelof Botha was a fellow PayPal Mafioso And then it took off In October 2005 a Nike ad called quotGolden Bootsquot featuring Brazilian soccer superstar Ronaldinho reached 1 million views becoming the first YouTube video to do soBy December 2005 YouTube came out of beta and reported 8 million views a day From there every few years it hit a major new milestoneMay 2007 marked the arrival of what is perhaps the first viral amateur video Known as quotCharlie Bit My Fingerquot the video featured 56 seconds of a baby biting his big brother39s finger Since then it39s been viewed nearly a billion times In July 2007 YouTube hosted a presidential primary debate together with CNN becoming a political player too For that election seven of the 16 candidates in the two parties announced their candidacies on YouTube Then just before the election the viral video quotEvolution of Dancequot posted in September 2008 became the first video to reach 100 million views And in October 2009 YouTube reached 1 billion views a day with 20 hours of new video uploaded every minuteAt the same time YouTube was growing in popularity it was growing as a business and developing powerful partnerships with legacy media brands In February 2006 NBC required YouTube to remove the Saturday Night Live digital short quotLazy Sundayquot from the platform for violating its copyright By June of that year YouTube and NBC reached a deal to promote the network39s programming a forerunner of other deals to come But an even more important business development came later that year In October 2006 Google acquired YouTube for 165 billion only 20 months after its foundingWhat made Google decide to make the big purchase A viral video of course Susan Wojcicki the search giant39s employee No 16 saw a clip of two boys in China lipsynching to the Backstreet Boys and realized usergenerated video would be huge In 2020 when the search giant made YouTube39s revenue public for the first time it revealed that the video service produced a whopping 15 billion a yearClick the social buttons to share this content with your friends and colleaguesThe opinions and points of view expressed in this content are exclusively the views of the author andor subjects and do not necessarily represent the views of MediaVillagecomMyersBizNet Inc management or associated writers

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HISTORY's Moment in Media: YouTube's Origin Story -- From Dating Site to Video Giant

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We Are the Outliers - By Jack Myers

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HISTORY's Moment in Media: YouTube's Origin Story -- From Dating Site to Video Giant

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We Are the Outliers - By Jack Myers

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