Youtube is becoming one of the most viewed video distribution sites on the internet, accumulating 3 billion hours without content every month. Over 500 hours of video content are estimated to be uploaded every minute to the platform.
With all of these videos, one might ask how the famous video-sharing platform started and how it has dominated the internet today.
With the rise of youtube in 2005, the platform has changed significantly. The platform was initially created for amateur videos to be posted online. This led to the emergence of a new profession in the content creation industry. This profession is a Youtube content creator, which has turned ordinary teenagers into millionaires overnight.
Like many other startups, Youtube was born in Silicon Valley and saw its beginning as a makeshift office constructed in a garage. The idea of youtube originated from a dinner party in San Francisco in 2004. The main idea behind the video-sharing website was that they were frustrated by how hard it was to share video clips online.
Three members formed the original founders of youtube, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. These were all former employees of the e-commerce company Paypal. The main idea that the group had was that ordinary people would enjoy sharing their home videos with the public.
Within the first few months of operation in May of 2005, youtube was attracting more than 30,000 visitors a day. By the time they went public with the company in December of 2005, youtube was showcasing more than two million videos per day. This number rose exponentially as more people started to find out about the new video-sharing website. In March of 2006, more than 20,000 new videos were uploaded to youtube every day.
With this new surge in growth, Youtube was forced to purchase more equipment and broadband connections to the internet. The founders had to deal with an unseen issue: putting money aside for potential legal battles as media companies discovered that videos on the platform contained copyrighted material.
As the platform continued to grow and the responsibilities as owners kept growing, the group decided to look for a buyer. At this time in 2005, the search engine company Google launched its own video-sharing platform called Google Video. This platform did not perform well, and Google parched youtube for $1.65 billion in stock in November of 2006. Instead of revamping the whole platform, Google decided to continue on the path that the original creators intended for the platform but with new tactics. Google was aware that one of Youtube's biggest downsides was copyright infringement. To combat this, Google negotiated deals with a significant amount of media companies that would allow their content to be shown on Youtube. Google also removed thousands of videos that included copyrighted material from their website.
Like any other company, youtube needed to get money to operate; before being parched in 2005, the company reported a monthly income of $15 million. At this level of income, Youtube was not profitable when Google bought it, but a return on investment was not what Goole was looking for. Google saw the potential in Youtube as a video-sharing platform, so they were ok with taking a company with negative revenue in the beginning. Google was focused on the fact that Youtube would take off as the number one video-sharing platform. Google eventually needed to add its Google advertisement service onto Youtube, which eventually brought in $200 million annually by June 2008. To get an idea of how far Youtube has come since its creation in the last quarter in December of 2019, youtube reported $46 billion in revenue, equating to $10.7 billion in profit.
Since its curation, YouTube has dominated video sharing on the internet and provided jobs and opportunities to hundreds of thousands of creators around the world. Youtube is truly an invaluable resource for information sharing that has maintained its popularity since 2005. The platform continues to evolve and change but has allowed video created around the world a platform to post on, and it has forever altered video sharing across the globe.
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