We all watch it, some more than TV, but what is the story of YouTube?
How did it come about, and where will it go in the future?
I’m going to answer one of these questions, Let’s begin.
The three founders of YouTube are Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, all of which are
famously ex-employees of PayPal.
The story goes that Chad and Steve attended a party but found it near impossible to share
a video they saw with other partygoers, and from that need they developed an idea for
a video-sharing website.
However, Steve later claimed that this may not be 100% true, it was just a marketing
thing for the media.
Either way, at the time there was a huge demand on the internet for a place to share and watch
video clips, so yeah.
The original concept for YouTube shared some elements with ‘Hot or not’ and incorporated
dating via video, which was later dropped in favour of a more open video-hosting platform
idea.
The initial website and business was funded with a rather big $3.5 million dollar, or
£2.5-million-pound investment from Sequoia Capital, a company that exclusively finds
and funds emerging companies.
The website was activated, logo created and everything started from the HQ in a flat above
a pizza restaurant on Valentine’s Day 2005, and the day after looked a little something
like THIS.
You can still look at this version of YouTube through the WayBack machine linked in the
description.
Yeah, a lot has changed.
Back in 2005, video sharing sites were the new thing, and YouTube was no exception as
people began to find themselves on the site.
The first video was posted on April 23rd, first comment not long after and soon the
expanding team who managed the ever-expanding YouTube could afford better tech and a better
less rat-infested HQ.
YouTube was the fastest growing site on the Web in 2006, and was surely growing into the
site we know today.
A year and a bit later in, YouTube had grown exponentially grown to 100 million views a
day and 60,000 new videos per day.
In November, cue Google, no wait, GOOGLE, there we go.
Google offer $1.6 billion dollars in Google stock for the company, which all gladly accept.
Ever since then, Google has owned and run YouTube, but Chad Hurley from the beginning
stayed on as CEO until late 2010.
YouTube was featured in Time Magazine’s Person of the Year.
You see that bar at the bottom?
That’s what the YouTube view bar used to look like.
It isn’t even recognisable anymore.
The site continued to grow exponentially over the rest of the decade, with it spawning such
classics as ‘Evolution of Dance’, ‘Sneezing Baby Panda’, ‘Charlie the Unicorn’,
‘Fred (urrghh)’ and a whole bunch of other internet memes that give me extreme nostalgia,
as I joined YouTube around this time.
(This account was made in 2010, but technically it was still 2009 in the US as it was early
morning, so whatever).
Around this time, YouTube got the new CEO after Chad left, Salar Kamangar.
Also, cue redesigns, on top of redesigns, on top of redesigns.
The rating system, yellow subscribe button and extreme channel personalisation were all
replaced and/or scrapped.
[I will never forget you].
Then came the forced Google+/YouTube integration that everyone hated and spammed stickmen in
the comments because they were mad.
That didn’t do anything, but eventually Google+ was removed from YouTube.
Google has come under fire from users for (quote) ‘ruining’ the site, even though
it was Google that owned the site during the ‘good old days’ and people like that have
no idea what they are talking about, though are correct in that decisions made by Google
are quite controversial and poorly thought out.
In this decade, which is 2010 – 2020 for all time travellers out there, YouTube kept
on growing.
3 billion hours of videos were watched every month in 2012.
Also, later on in 2014, YouTube got a third CEO, Susan (vui-chEE-skee).
She was previously an important employee of Google, with her initially getting a job in
the company by renting out her garage to the founders of Google to use as an HQ in 1998.
That’s pretty cool.
The advantages of a free online platform for video media were so big it drew the attention
of normal TV companies whose market was being encroached on, like I mentioned previously.
So came the introduction of TV and Films to YouTube, all available for purchase.
Next, and pretty recently in 2014 and 2015 came YouTube Red, which offers a whole bunch
of videos, music and streaming ad-free for a monthly payment of real world money.
Hey, someday maybe it can come to the UK, when I won’t use it.
So, here we are today, with YouTube’s new crazes involving Reaction Videos, Harassment
dressed up as pranks, Facebook freebooting and also a whole bunch of misused copyright
strikes.
So, eleven years down the line and everything has changed beyond recognition, and will continue
to change as time goes on.
What’s next?
No idea.
Until next time, thanks for watching.