The YouTube website has only existed since 2005 and is already visited more than four billion times a day. Other staggering statistics: 48 hours of video are uploaded every minute and the number of unique visitors per month is currently 800 million. Figures that competitors can only dream of—the instant hit story of when YouTube founded and the details of the founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.
Who Is It About?
Chad Hurley and Steve Chen.
Where and When Were They Born?
Chad Hurley was born on July 21, 1977, in Birdsboro, Pennsylvania, Steve Chen was born in August 1978 in Taipei, the capital of the island of Taiwan.
Which Company Is It?
When Was Youtube Founded?
February 2005.
How Did Youtube Come About?
Hurley and Chen met when they both worked side jobs at an e-commerce startup called PayPal. Chen held an assistant technical position there, while Hurley was hired to design a suitable corporate logo. Hurley’s design is still used by PayPal today.
Both Chen and Hurley had contributed significantly to the startup’s success, so when eBay acquired PayPal for approximately $ 1.5 billion, both men received a generous bonus for the services rendered. The two had become good friends and spent a lot of time together discussing business ideas. They decided that, should it ever come to that, invest the money from their bonuses in their own future business.
That moment came in 2005. After the boys attended a dinner with friends and wanted to share some video images, they ran into several problems. The file is too large to email, and putting it online took too much time. Then the idea for YouTube arose; establishing and running a website where people can quickly and easily upload video clips and then share them. They received help in developing the website and developing the concept from Jared Karim, who is considered by some to be the third founder of YouTube. However, after its founding, Karim chose to pursue a Masters’s degree at Stanford University.
Chen and Hurley wanted to focus on their new project full-time. Ease of use had to be central at YouTube. We may have pushed back the memory a bit by now, but for the era of YouTube, putting a video on the internet or watching it could be a drama. Regardless of how long it could take to upload or download, the question was whether the video could be played.
That could be better and simpler, Hurley and Chen must have thought. They opted for a user-friendly Flash program, of which the image quality was somewhat less at the time but accessible to all internet users. In addition, they made sure that YouTube videos could also be placed on external websites, including social networking sites such as MySpace (the predecessor of Facebook), an intelligent way to get extra exposure ‘for free’.
After the domain name was registered in February 2005 and a beta version went online in May, Chen and Hurley got even more good news in November: a first significant investor had been found. Sequoia Capital was willing to invest $ 3.5 billion in the Internet project. YouTube was officially launched in December 2005. In that very first month, eight million videos were viewed per day. Interesting detail: at that time, the men were still running the site and their company from a garage in San Mateo. Fortunately, it did not take long before the duo could move into a ‘real’ office building (see the first video below this article).
Read : When Twitter Was Established
How Did Youtube Stand Out From The Competition?
Due to the enormous range of publicly accessible video fragments. If there’s one thing that set YouTube apart from other online video sites in its early days, it was the fact that users could find just about anything there. From old fragments from Bassie and Adriaan and funny compilations of falling athletes to a rare recording of a performance by Bob Dylan: anyone who could find their way online a little bit soon came across what he was looking for on YouTube. And without having to pay money for it too.
In later years, this ‘open policy’ would eventually turn against YouTube. For example, it still regularly happens that television stations and record companies sue the website for copyright infringement. As soon as copyright complaints about censorship come in, the fragments in question are always neatly removed. But YouTube doesn’t do that on its own. Yet Hurley and Chen say they knew what they were getting into from the start. “We are not doing anything that is prohibited by law,” Hurley explained in an interview a few years ago.
Another unique aspect of the website is that users could also upload their own videos. Whether it concerns an analysis of a political debate, the cat chasing its tail or a band covering a song with the five of us on one guitar: YouTube had instantly given the world an interactive stage. Amateur movies have been the best viewed since the start. Perhaps that’s why Hurley reacted so confidently to the question of what happens when movie studios and artists decide to delete all their movie trailers, video clips, and performances. “Copyrighted material is just the tip of the iceberg of what YouTube has to offer.”
Why was YouTube sold to Google?
Well, if the giant Google was just a year after the establishment of your e-commerce company on the door with a generous offer of $ 1.65 billion, including shares in Google itself, what would you do? Chen and Hurley didn’t have to think twice about it either. Although they were initially still in charge of the day-to-day running of YouTube, they have not been involved full-time in the policy of the video site for some time now. Hurley handed over his position as CEO to Salar Kamangar in October 2010, although he will remain an external advisor.
Read : When Google Was Established
How is YouTube now?
YouTube seems to be getting bigger (if possible). Every day, four billion films are watched worldwide, and these are no longer just fragments of old TV series and the latest clip of Madonna. YouTube has also become an increasingly important player in the field of current affairs in recent years. Last year, for example, the government of Iran did everything it could to suppress (the publicity surrounding) the revolution. Still, videos with shocking images of fighting demonstrators appeared here and there on YouTube. That is probably the main reason that YouTube is not available worldwide, such as in China. Thailand, Pakistan, Morocco, and Turkey have also blocked the site (temporarily or otherwise) for political reasons.
YouTube earns its money by placing advertisements and is a goldmine for Google in that area. The so-called ‘clickads’ in the videos raised no less than five billion dollars in 2011. Another source of income is concluding lucrative contracts with content providers. Most record companies and TV stations are slowly but surely becoming aware that YouTube can’t be beaten. Parties such as Reuters, HULU, the BBC, and pop stars such as Madonna and Jay-Z have chosen eggs for their money. They agreed with YouTube that as long as their material is available on the site, they are entitled to a share of the proceeds. And with the current four billion watched videos that are watched daily, that adds quite a bit to a somewhat popular video.
Inspirational quote
Steve Chen: “Entrepreneurship is also daring to take risks. Just put a lot of your time and energy into something new and then after two or three months see where you end up.”
Videos
Video about YouTube’s startup phase:
