YouTube

YouTube is an American online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen, who were former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in San Bruno, California, it is the second-most-visited website in the world, after Google itself. In January 2024, YouTube had more than 2.7 billion monthly active users, who collectively consumed more than one billion hours of video content every day. As of May 2019, videos were being uploaded to the platform at a rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute, and as of mid-2024, there were approximately 14.8 billion videos in total.

On November 13, 2006, YouTube was purchased by Google for US$1.65 billion (equivalent to $2.44 billion in 2025). Google expanded YouTube's business model from generating revenue through advertisements alone to offering paid content such as movies and exclusive content explicitly produced for YouTube. It also offers YouTube Premium, a paid subscription option for watching content without ads. YouTube incorporated the Google AdSense program, generating more revenue for both YouTube and approved content creators. In 2023, YouTube's advertising revenue totaled $31.7 billion, a 2% increase from the $31.1 billion reported in 2022. From Q4 2023 to Q3 2024, YouTube's combined revenue from advertising and subscriptions exceeded $50 billion.

Since its purchase by Google, YouTube has expanded beyond the core website, creating mobile apps, network television, games, and the ability to link with other platforms. Video categories on YouTube include music videos, video clips, news, short and feature films, songs, documentaries, movie trailers, teasers, TV spots, live streams, vlogs, and more. Most content is generated by individuals, including collaborations between YouTubers and corporate sponsors. Established media, news, and entertainment corporations have also created and expanded their visibility on YouTube channels to reach bigger audiences.

YouTube has had unprecedented social impact, influencing popular culture, internet trends, and creating multimillionaire celebrities. Despite its growth and success, the platform has been criticized for its facilitation of the spread of misinformation and copyrighted content, routinely violating its users' privacy, excessive censorship, endangering the safety of children and their well-being, and for its inconsistent implementation of platform guidelines.

History

Founding and initial growth (2005–2006)

YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen. The three were early employees at PayPal and had become wealthy after eBay's acquisition of the company. Hurley had studied design at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

According to a story that has often been repeated in the media, Hurley and 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. Karim did not attend the party and denied that it had occurred, but Chen remarked 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".

Karim said the inspiration for YouTube came from the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show controversy when Janet Jackson's breast was briefly exposed by Justin Timberlake during the halftime show. Karim could not easily find video clips of the incident and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami online, which led to the idea of a video-sharing site. Hurley and Chen said that the original idea for YouTube was a video version of an online dating service and had been influenced by the website Hot or Not. They created posts on Craigslist asking attractive women to upload videos of themselves to YouTube in exchange for a $100 reward. Difficulty in finding enough dating videos led to a change of plans, with the site's founders deciding to accept uploads of any video.

YouTube began as a venture capital–funded technology startup. Between November 2005 and April 2006, the company raised money from various investors, with Sequoia Capital and Artis Capital Management being the largest two. YouTube's early headquarters were situated above a pizzeria and a Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California. In February 2005, the company registered www.youtube.com. The first video was uploaded on April 23, 2005. Titled "Me at the zoo", it shows co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo and can still be viewed on the site. The same day, the company launched a public beta and by November, a Nike ad featuring Ronaldinho became the first video to reach one million total views. The site exited beta in December 2005, by which time the site was receiving 8 million views a day. Clips at the time were limited to 100 megabytes, as little as 30 seconds of footage.

YouTube was not the first video-sharing site on the Internet; Vimeo was founded in November 2004, though that site remained a side project of its developers from CollegeHumor. On December 17, 2005, the same week YouTube exited beta, NBCUniversal Saturday Night Live ran a sketch "Lazy Sunday" by The Lonely Island. Besides helping to bolster ratings and long-term viewership for Saturday Night Live, "Lazy Sunday"'s status as an early viral video helped establish YouTube as an important website. Unofficial uploads of the skit to YouTube drew in more than five million collective views by February 2006 before they were removed when NBCUniversal requested it two months later based on copyright concerns. Despite eventually being taken down, these duplicate uploads of the skit helped popularize YouTube's reach and led to the upload of more third-party content. The site grew rapidly; 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.

The choice of the name youtube.com led to problems for a similarly named website, utube.com. That site's owner, Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment (Universal Tube), filed a lawsuit against YouTube in November 2006, after being regularly overloaded by people looking for YouTube. Universal Tube subsequently changed its website to www.utubeonline.com.

"Broadcast Yourself" era (2006–2013)

On October 9, 2006, Google announced that they had acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock. The deal was finalized on November 13, 2006. Google's acquisition launched newfound interest in video-sharing sites; IAC, which now owned Vimeo, focused on supporting the content creators to distinguish itself from YouTube. It was at this time that YouTube adopted the slogan "Broadcast Yourself". The company experienced rapid growth. The Daily Telegraph wrote that in 2007, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000. By 2010, the company had reached a market share of around 43% and more than 14 billion views of videos, according to comScore. That year, the company simplified its interface to increase the time users would spend on the site.

In 2011, more than three billion videos were being watched each day with 48 hours of new videos uploaded every minute. Most of these views came from a relatively small number of videos; according to a software engineer at that time, 30% of videos accounted for 99% of views on the site. That year, the company again changed its interface and at the same time, introduced a new logo with a darker shade of red. A subsequent interface change, designed to unify the experience across desktop, TV, and mobile, was rolled out in 2013. By that point, more than 100 hours were being uploaded every minute, increasing to 300 hours by November 2014.

During that time, the company also went through some organizational changes. In October 2006, YouTube moved to a new office in San Bruno, California. Hurley announced that he would be stepping down as chief executive officer of YouTube to take an advisory role and that Salar Kamangar would take over as head of the company in October 2010. In April 2009, YouTube partnered with Vevo. In April 2010, Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance" became the most-viewed video, becoming the first video to reach 200 million views on May 9, 2010.

YouTube faced a major lawsuit by Viacom International in 2011 that nearly resulted in the discontinuation of the website. The lawsuit was filed due to alleged copyright infringement of Viacom's material by YouTube. However, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that YouTube was not liable, and thus, YouTube won the case in 2012.