YouTube was founded by
Chad Hurley,
Steve Chen and
Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of
PayPal.
Hurley studied design at
Indiana University of Pennsylvania, while Chen and Karim studied
computer science together at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
According to a story that has often been repeated in the media, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen developed the idea for YouTube during the early months of 2005, after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen's apartment in San Francisco. Jawed Karim did not attend the party and denied that it had occurred, while Chad Hurley commented that the idea that YouTube was founded after a dinner party "was probably very strengthened by marketing ideas around creating a story that was very digestible."
YouTube began as a venture-funded technology startup, primarily from a US$11.5 million investment by
Sequoia Capital between November 2005 and April 2006.
YouTube's early headquarters were situated above a
pizzeria and
Japanese restaurant in
San Mateo, California.
The
domain name www.youtube.com was activated on February 14, 2005, and the website was developed over the subsequent months.
The first YouTube video was entitled
Me at the zoo, and shows founder Jawed Karim at
San Diego Zoo.
The video was uploaded on April 23, 2005, and can still be viewed on the site.
YouTube offered the public a
beta test of the site in May 2005, six months before the official launch in November 2005. The site grew rapidly, and in July 2006 the company announced that more than 65,000 new videos were being uploaded every day, and that the site was receiving 100 million video views per day.
According to data published by
market research company
comScore, YouTube is the dominant provider of online video in the United States, with a
market share of around 43 percent and more than six billion videos viewed in January 2009.
It is estimated that 20 hours of new videos are uploaded to the site every minute, and that around three quarters of the material comes from outside the United States.
It is also estimated that in 2007 YouTube consumed as much
bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000
In March 2008, YouTube's bandwidth costs were estimated at approximately US$1 million a day.
Alexa ranks YouTube as the fourth most visited website on the Internet, behind Google, Yahoo! and
Facebook.
The choice of the name
www.youtube.com led to problems for a similarly named website,
www.utube.com. The owner of the site,
Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment, filed a lawsuit against YouTube in November 2006 after being overloaded on a regular basis by people looking for YouTube. Universal Tube has since changed the name of its website to
www.utubeonline.com.
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In October 2006,
Google Inc. announced that it had acquired YouTube for US$1.65 billion in Google
stock, and the deal was finalized on November 13, 2006.
Google does not provide detailed figures for YouTube's running costs, and YouTube's revenues in 2007 were noted as "
not material" in a regulatory filing.
[ In June 2008 a
Forbes magazine article projected the 2008 revenue at US$200 million, noting progress in advertising sales.
In November 2008, YouTube reached an agreement with
MGM,
Lions Gate Entertainment and CBS, allowing the companies to post full-length films and television episodes on the site, accompanied by advertisements in a section for US viewers called "Shows". The move was intended to create competition with websites such as
Hulu, which features material from NBC,
Fox, and
Disney.
In November 2009, YouTube launched a version of "Shows" available to UK viewers, offering around 4000 full-length shows from more than 60 partners.
On October 9, 2009, the third anniversary of the acquisition by Google, Chad Hurley announced in a blog posting that YouTube was serving "well over a billion views a day" worldwide.
Starting in March 2010, YouTube will stream all 60 cricket matches of the
Indian Premier League worldwide for free.
Making it the world's first
free online broadcast of a major sporting event.
Source:
Wikipedia