Youtube is a massive and successful social media platform that is used for online video sharing. It is the most used website and has more than a billion users around the globe, along with the people that watch billion of videos every day.
But have you ever wondered how it all started? How a simple video-sharing site turned into a massive full-time earning platform for billions of people who post unique and entertaining content?
Origin of Youtube
Youtube was founded on the 14th of February 2005. It was launched by three people, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were employees at PayPal.
Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim
According to the founders, the inspiration for Youtube came from the difficulty of finding and sharing videos online. At first, its purpose was to serve as a video dating app, but this idea was not so successful, so the founders changed it to a video-sharing site for any content.
The Success Journey of Youtube
It did not take Youtube much time to gain recognition around the world. Quickly, it started to undergo partnerships with big companies like Sequoia Capital – an American venture capital firm with over 3.3 trillion of combined stock market value.
The First Video on Youtube
The first video ever posted on Youtube was by one of its co-founders, Jawed Karim. This video was a vlog about him exploring the San Diego zoo entitled “Me at the Zoo.”
Nike Ad featuring Ronaldinho
The public beta version of Youtube was released in May 2005. This proved to be a significant step as it gained Youtube more success. As everybody was able to use the site, it gained attention and attracted more viewers.
Youtube featured an ad by Nike featuring Ronaldinho and it was the first video on Youtube that got one million views.
Eventually, Youtube also started to display live shows and entertainment productions, gaining them as high as 100 million views per day.
Bought by Google
The video-sharing site gained even more success after Google bought it in October 2006 for almost $1.7 billion. From then on, the platform experienced massive growth, and by 2010, it had 2 billion views per day, and 48 hours of videos were uploaded every minute. During that time, Salar Kamangar took the lead as head of the company, and Hurley stepped down.
image via Business Insider
Successful Strategies
Through time, the site introduced new strategies to attract even more viewers. It simplified its access to laptops, computers, TVs, and mobile phones by 2013 and changed its logo to a darker shade of red. Again, such brilliant strategies benefitted from the site itself. By 2014, the site had gained 300 hours of videos uploaded each minute. In the same year, the CEO of Youtube was also changed to Susan Wojcicki.
The company also introduced its offices in San Bruno, USA. The Youtube logo was redesigned in 2017 to a classy yet attractive logo and remained the same.
In this era of Youtube (2014-18), the site tried many strategies to increase its revenue. It offered a platform for content creators for a subscription-based channel from where they could earn money. It also provided to highlight a particular comment for donations ranging from $1 to $500. Side by side, it also launched a Music-key that allowed people to listen to streaming music in association with the Google Play music service in 2014.
Other Apps Under Youtube
Youtube Red was another platform launched by the company in 2015 which offered ad-free access to music, films, and content published by the site users. Similarly, Youtube music was established where the users uploaded their musical talent.
Besides these, Youtube also released other apps such as Youtube kids, featuring cartoons and learning for children under parental control, and Youtube gaming which features live streaming and gameplays.
Present
By 2019, Youtube had gained more than 500 hours of video uploading per minute and more than a billion views per day. In 2020, Youtube profited massively during the pandemic as everyone stayed home and enjoyed hours of free and quality entertainment.
According to an estimation, Youtube has a 15% bandwidth of all internet traffic and is constantly gaining momentum each day.
Along with success comes controversies. The same was the case with Youtube. This company also faced some backlash on disputes like the similar name to another site (utube) and insufficient measures to protect child privacy. But so far, Youtube has handled such controversies well, and we hope they may do so and gain more victories in the future.
