YouTube is an American online video streaming as well as a social media platform. So When did YouTube start? Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim are the ones that launched YouTube in February of 2005. YouTube is the second most visited website in the whole world, after Google. To put in perspective how huge it is, YouTube has 122 million active users daily. With over one billion monthly users, users watch more than one billion hours of videos each day. According to an estimate, videos are being uploaded at a high rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute.
Who owns YouTube?
YouTube was purchase by Goggle for $1.65 billion in October of 2006. Under Google’s ownership, YouTube had changed its business model, it no longer generates revenue just from advertisements alone. It currently offers paid content like movies and exclusive content. YouTube as well as validated creators are also able to participate in Google’s AdSense program, which helps in generating more revenue for both parties i.e. YouTube and the content creator. YouTube managed to evolve from just a website to mobile applications, network television and can link with services like Discord as well as Nintendo.
History on “When did YouTube start”
Hurley and Chen had developed the idea for YouTube after they faced difficulty sharing videos. Karim’s inspiration came from the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show controversy, which was Janet Jackson’s breast being briefly exposed by Justin Timberlake during the halftime show. As he couldn’t easily find video clips of that incident, this inspired the idea of a video-sharing site.
In February of 2005, the company had activated www.youtube.com. YouTube’s first-ever video was uploaded on April 23 of 2005. Titled “Me at the zoo”, it showed co-founder Jawed Karim at San Diego Zoo. By the time November of that year, it rolled in, Nike’s advertisement featuring Ronaldinho and had become the first-ever video to reach 1 million total views. The site was officially rolled out on December 15 of 2005, during that time YouTube was receiving around 8 million views per day.
The name www.youtube.com had caused problems for an analogous named website, www.utube.com. Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment (site’s owner) filed a lawsuit against YouTube in November of 2006, as it was regularly being overloaded by people that we’re searching for YouTube.
A subsequent interface change, which unified the experience across desktop, TV, and mobile, was released to the public in 2013. Till that time period, more than 100 hours of content was being uploaded every minute which then proceeded to increase to 300 hours till November 2014.
Susan Wojcicki was named the CEO of YouTube in February of 2014. Which followed the redesigning of the logo which was built around the service’s play button emblem in August 2017. Currently now YouTube after being attacked on April 3, 2018, which resulted in 4 being injured and 1 death in the shootout, a complaint alleging violations of the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act in 2018. YouTube also got into disputes with other tech companies like Amazon and Roku.
After facing Consolidation, censorship and controversy and many adversaries YouTube thrived during the Pandemic and is riding the tide. If you liked this article (or if it helped at all), please leave us a comment below or share it with friends, so they can get to know YouTube’s history too.
