Pioneers 

In late 2004, three former employees of the e-commerce company Paypal decided they wanted to create a new video-sharing platform. These three entrepreneurs were Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. These individuals pioneered the beginning of youtube because they believed that ordinary people would enjoy sharing their home videos with the public. 

Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. 

The original idea behind youtube originated in 2004 at a dinner party in San Francisco when the founders realized how hard it was to share videos online. In February of 2005, On Valentine's Day, Hurley acting as CEO registered the domain, logo, and trademark of youtube. 

Early Adopters 

In the beginning, the three founders decided to create Youtube as a dating site and release it to a small set of users in 2005. This, however, did not gain traction and forced co-founders to start paying women $20 to post ads. Instead of most videos on the site being from paid ads, the founders were amazed as thousands of people started posting all kinds of content to the site. One of the first videos on the site was of Jawed Karim giving a commencement speech in 2007. 

Jawed Karim giving a commencement speech in 2007.

The individuals who first posted to Youtube were early adopters because they saw potential in the site as a video distribution service. These individuals had no idea that youtube would soon skyrocket.

In September 2005, investment firm Sequoia Capital invested $3.5 million in YouTube. A partner at Sequoia Capital, Roelof Botha, had worked at Paypal with the co-founders and heard about their new project.

Sequoia Capital partner Roelof Botha

 Botha had high hopes for the platform after he used it to upload old wedding and honeymoon videos. Roelof Botha was an early adopter of Youtube because even though the website wasn't popular, he still used the site to publish content. Early Adopters have much more control over their investments because the company is still developing. 

Early Majority 

In 2006 a video was uploaded to Youtube by two boys in China, lip-syncing to a song by the Backstreet Boys. Susan Wojcicki, Youtube's current CEO, who was in charge of Google's acquisitions, saw the video and credits it with convincing her that Youtube was worth an investment by Google.

 Boys in China lip-synching to the Backstreet Boys.

 After seeing the growth potential, Sequoia Capital invests another $8 million into the company bringing their total investment to $12 million. Youtube was finally bought out by Google later that year, and Sequoia Capital received a massive payout. 

In October of 2006, after a battle between Yahoo and Google, Google finally acquired Youtube for $1.65 billion, which paid out approximately $400 million each for the founders of the sight. As soon as the deal was done, Google moved the headquarters of Youtube to its new headquarters in San Bruno, California. Google was part of the Early Majority because they waited a significant amount of time before purchasing youtube. They watched as companies like Sequoia Capital invested $12 million before they even started to look at the possibility of investing in the platform. 

Late Adopters 

When Google purchased Youtube in 2006, youtube was experiencing negative revenue. They needed to make money, so Google incorporated its AdSense program on Youtube. Google saw an opportunity to not only profit from Youtube content but also connect with one of the largest audiences in the world. When google ads were placed on videos, they eventually brought in $200 million annually by June 2008. 

Google ads can be considered Late Adopters because they failed to implement advertisements until the company lost money. Late Adopters often show up late in the history of a company due to skepticism about the product or service.  

Laggards 

In December 2009, YouTube partnered with Universal Music Group to create the music-video site Vevo. Their business model was built on the fact that Youtube would handle the platform's technology while Universal Music Group sourced the content. Both companies agreed to share ad revenue. Universal Music Group can be considered Laggards because they partnered with Youtube after the site gained billions of views and had already been invested in by countless companies. 

To put this into perspective, In 2009, youtube had 100.9 million viewers that watched 6.3 billion videos on YouTube. This could be because Universal Music was skeptical about partnering with Youtube until they saw the numbers that were being generated. Ultimately Universal Music was last to partner with Youtube for unknown reasons and can be considered Laggards.