YouTube Launches: The Birth of Viral Video
Three former PayPal employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, registered the domain youtube.com on February 14, 2005, after struggling to find video of Janet Jackson's Super Bowl wardrobe malfunction and the Indian Ocean tsunami online. The first video, 'Me at the Zoo' featuring Karim at the San Diego Zoo, was uploaded on April 23, 2005. The platform gained traction because it solved a genuine technical problem: sharing video files online was cumbersome, requiring codecs, compression knowledge, and massive bandwidth. YouTube made it as simple as uploading and clicking 'play.' Sequoia Capital invested .5 million, and Google acquired the company for .65 billion in stock just eighteen months after launch. The platform now hosts over 800 million videos, serves two billion monthly users, and has created an entirely new economy of content creators who earn their living from advertising revenue generated by user attention.
February 14, 2005
21 years ago
Key Figures & Places
What Else Happened on February 14
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