YouTube
Based on Wikipedia: YouTube
In February 2005, three former PayPal employees registered a domain name that would fundamentally reshape how humanity creates, shares, and consumes video. Within eighteen months, Google would pay $1.65 billion for their creation. Within two decades, it would become the second most-visited website on Earth, host nearly fifteen billion videos, and command more than 2.7 billion monthly active users—roughly a third of everyone on the planet with internet access.
This is the story of YouTube.
The Origin Story That Probably Isn't True
Every tech company needs a founding myth, and YouTube's is particularly charming. According to the oft-repeated tale, co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen came up with the idea for YouTube after struggling to share videos from a dinner party at Chen's San Francisco apartment in early 2005.
There's just one problem. The third co-founder, Jawed Karim, says the party never happened.
Chen later admitted the dinner party story "was probably very strengthened by marketing ideas around creating a story that was very digestible." In other words, they made it up because it sounded good.
The real origin story is messier and more interesting. Karim claims the spark came from two very different events: the Super Bowl halftime show controversy of February 2004, when Janet Jackson's wardrobe famously malfunctioned during a performance with Justin Timberlake, and the devastating Indian Ocean tsunami later that year. When Karim tried to find video clips of either event online, he couldn't. The infrastructure for sharing video on the internet simply didn't exist in any meaningful way.
Meanwhile, Hurley and Chen had a different vision entirely. They initially conceived YouTube as a video version of Hot or Not, the website where users voted on people's attractiveness. Their first plan was literally to pay attractive women to upload videos of themselves. They posted ads on Craigslist offering a hundred dollars for such videos.
It didn't work. They couldn't find enough people willing to participate in their video dating service. So they pivoted to something much simpler: let anyone upload any video about anything.
Sometimes the most revolutionary ideas are just failed dating apps with broader scope.
From Pizzeria Upstairs to Billion-Dollar Acquisition
YouTube's first headquarters sat above a pizzeria and a Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California. The location tells you everything you need to know about how venture capital-funded startups operate—they raise millions of dollars but still work out of whatever cheap space they can find.
The first video ever uploaded went live on April 23, 2005. Titled "Me at the zoo," it runs nineteen seconds and shows Jawed Karim standing in front of the elephant exhibit at the San Diego Zoo. "The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks," Karim says, somewhat awkwardly. "And that's pretty much all there is to say." The video remains viewable today, a humble monument to what came after.
Growth was immediate and explosive. By the time YouTube launched its public beta that same day in April, clips were limited to 100 megabytes—which in 2005 meant maybe thirty seconds of footage. Within months, the platform was receiving eight million views per day. By November, a Nike advertisement featuring Brazilian soccer star Ronaldinho became the first video to reach one million views.
The real breakthrough came from an unlikely source: Saturday Night Live.
On December 17, 2005, the comedy sketch show aired "Lazy Sunday," a comedic rap video by the group The Lonely Island about going to see The Chronicles of Narnia. The sketch was funny, but what mattered more was what happened next. People started uploading it to YouTube—illegally, without permission from NBCUniversal, which owned the show.
By February 2006, these unauthorized uploads had accumulated more than five million collective views. NBCUniversal eventually demanded they be taken down, but the damage was done. Or rather, the success was achieved. Millions of people had discovered YouTube existed, and they liked what they found.
This pattern—users uploading copyrighted content, driving massive traffic, then facing takedown requests—would define YouTube's complicated relationship with traditional media for years to come.
Google Enters the Picture
In October 2006, Google announced it was buying YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. The deal closed on November 13.
To understand how remarkable this was, remember that YouTube was barely eighteen months old. It had no clear path to profitability. It was hemorrhaging money on bandwidth costs. It faced potentially ruinous lawsuits from media companies whose content users were uploading without permission. Google bought it anyway.
The acquisition reflected a new reality in the tech industry. The value of a platform wasn't in its current revenue but in its user base and growth trajectory. YouTube had both in abundance.
Google's purchase triggered a scramble among competitors. Vimeo, which had actually launched before YouTube in November 2004 but had remained a side project of its developers at CollegeHumor, suddenly found itself trying to differentiate. They chose to focus on supporting professional content creators rather than competing for mass audiences.
YouTube, meanwhile, adopted the slogan "Broadcast Yourself." It was the perfect encapsulation of what the platform offered: television for everyone, by everyone, about everything.
Growth at an Incomprehensible Scale
The numbers that followed defy easy comprehension.
By 2007, YouTube was consuming as much internet bandwidth as the entire worldwide web had used in the year 2000. In 2010, the platform held 43 percent of the video market and was serving fourteen billion video views. By 2011, users were watching three billion videos per day, with forty-eight hours of new content being uploaded every minute.
Consider what that means. Every minute, two full days' worth of video was being added to the platform. If you wanted to watch everything uploaded in a single hour, and you watched continuously without sleeping, it would take you nearly three months.
And it kept accelerating. By November 2014, uploads had risen to three hundred hours per minute. By February 2017, users were watching one billion hours of video per day—and four hundred hours of new content were being uploaded every minute. Two years later, that had risen to five hundred hours per minute.
As of mid-2024, approximately 14.8 billion videos exist on YouTube. If each video averaged ten minutes, watching them all would take 282,000 years.
These numbers reveal something profound about human creativity and the desire to be seen. Given an infinite stage and a global audience, people will fill it with content at a pace that makes traditional media production look leisurely by comparison.
The Business of Eyeballs
How do you make money from a platform that gives away content for free?
The answer, as it is for most of the modern internet, is advertising. Google integrated YouTube with its AdSense program, which allows advertisers to place targeted ads before, during, and around videos. The system shares revenue with content creators, giving individuals an incentive to produce material that attracts viewers.
This model created an entirely new category of celebrity: the YouTuber. People who might never have gotten a television deal or a movie contract could build audiences in the millions and earn substantial incomes through advertising revenue. Some became genuine stars. Many more found modest success reaching niche audiences that traditional media would never have served.
In 2023, YouTube's advertising revenue totaled $31.7 billion. That's more than the entire annual revenue of media giants like ViacomCBS or Fox Corporation. Between the fourth quarter of 2023 and the third quarter of 2024, YouTube's combined revenue from advertising and subscriptions exceeded $50 billion.
But advertising wasn't enough. YouTube kept experimenting with new revenue streams.
In 2013, the company launched premium subscription channels. In 2014, they announced "Music Key," bundling ad-free music streaming with Google Play Music. In 2015, this evolved into YouTube Red (later renamed YouTube Premium), offering ad-free access to all content, original programming, and background playback on mobile devices. A separate YouTube Music app followed, competing directly with Spotify and Apple Music.
The company also launched Super Chat in 2017, allowing viewers to pay between one and five hundred dollars to have their comments highlighted during live streams. It's the digital equivalent of tipping a street performer, scaled to global proportions.
The YouTube Industrial Complex
YouTube didn't just change how we watch video. It changed who makes video and why.
Traditional media production is expensive, controlled by gatekeepers, and optimized for broad audiences. YouTube inverted all of this. Production costs dropped to zero if you had a smartphone. The gatekeepers disappeared—anyone could upload anything. And the algorithm rewarded specificity, helping creators find their exact audience no matter how narrow.
The result was an explosion of content that never would have existed under the old system. Tutorials on obscure technical skills. Commentary on niche hobbies. Educational content on every conceivable subject. Entertainment formats that traditional executives would have rejected as too weird or too narrow.
Some of this was genuinely wonderful. YouTube democratized knowledge in ways that previous generations could barely imagine. A kid in rural Indonesia could learn calculus from the same teachers as a kid in New York. An aspiring musician could study the techniques of masters without ever setting foot in a conservatory.
But the YouTube industrial complex also created perverse incentives. The algorithm rewarded engagement above all else, and engagement often meant controversy, outrage, or content designed to capture attention through manipulation rather than merit. The race for views encouraged a kind of escalating arms race where creators felt pressure to be more extreme, more provocative, more attention-grabbing.
The Children Problem
Perhaps no issue has proved more intractable than YouTube's relationship with children.
Kids love YouTube. They love watching other people play video games. They love unboxing videos where adults open toys. They love animation, nursery rhymes, and endless variations on characters they recognize from other media.
This created a massive audience—and massive problems.
In 2018, the Federal Trade Commission accused YouTube of violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, commonly known by its acronym COPPA. The law restricts collecting personal information from users under thirteen years old. YouTube had been doing exactly that, building advertising profiles on millions of children.
The resulting fine was $170 million—substantial for most companies, barely a rounding error for Google. More significant were the required changes. YouTube now requires creators to designate whether their content is "made for kids," and such content faces restrictions on data collection, personalized advertising, and certain interactive features.
In 2015, YouTube had launched YouTube Kids, a separate app with curated content and parental controls. But problems persisted. Disturbing content kept slipping through the filters. Videos that appeared child-friendly on the surface contained inappropriate material. The algorithm, optimizing for engagement, sometimes led young viewers down rabbit holes to increasingly problematic content.
In 2021, YouTube introduced "supervised mode," designed for tweens who had outgrown YouTube Kids but weren't ready for the full platform. The company keeps iterating, but the fundamental tension remains: how do you protect children on a platform built on unlimited uploads and algorithmic recommendation?
The Dislike Button Controversy
In November 2021, YouTube made a decision that revealed how much power the platform holds over online discourse: they removed the public display of dislike counts on videos.
YouTube claimed the decision was based on internal research showing that users often weaponized the dislike button for cyberbullying and brigading—when organized groups mass-dislike content to damage a creator's reputation.
Critics saw something different. They noted that removing visible dislikes made it harder for viewers to identify low-quality or misleading content. The dislike count served as a rough quality signal, especially for instructional videos or product reviews where accuracy mattered.
Jawed Karim, the YouTube co-founder who uploaded the very first video, called it "a stupid idea." His criticism went deeper than mere preference. He argued that users' collective ability to flag problematic content was essential to how the platform functioned. "There's a name for it: the wisdom of the crowds," Karim wrote. "The process breaks when the platform interferes with it. Then, the platform invariably declines."
Within weeks of the announcement, a software developer named Dmitry Selivanov created Return YouTube Dislike, a browser extension that restored the dislike count using archived data and statistical estimation. Millions of people installed it.
The controversy illustrated a broader truth about modern platforms: the companies that control them can change the rules at any time, for any reason, and users have little recourse beyond exit or workaround.
Competition and Conflict
YouTube's dominance hasn't gone unchallenged.
In 2015, the company launched YouTube Gaming to compete with Twitch, the Amazon-owned platform that had captured the live-streaming video game audience. The competition continues today, with both platforms fighting for exclusive deals with popular streamers.
In 2020, YouTube launched Shorts, its answer to TikTok's explosive growth in short-form vertical video. The feature allows videos up to sixty seconds and mimics TikTok's full-screen, swipe-to-scroll interface. Whether it can truly compete with TikTok remains an open question.
YouTube has also clashed with other tech giants. For over a year in 2018-19, no YouTube app was available on Amazon Fire products—the result of a dispute between Google and Amazon over streaming devices and access to content. In 2020, Roku removed the YouTube TV app from its streaming store over similar disagreements.
These conflicts reveal the limits of platform power. YouTube may be dominant, but it still depends on other companies for distribution. When those relationships sour, users suffer.
The Legal Battles
Almost from the beginning, YouTube faced legal challenges that threatened its existence.
The fundamental problem was copyright. Users were uploading content they didn't own—music videos, movie clips, TV shows, sports highlights. The media companies that owned this content were not pleased. They saw YouTube as a massive piracy operation masquerading as a tech platform.
The most significant lawsuit came from Viacom International, which sued YouTube in 2007 for one billion dollars in damages. Viacom owned Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, and numerous other channels. They argued that YouTube had knowingly built its business on copyright infringement.
The case dragged on for years, generating enormous anxiety within YouTube. If Viacom won, it could establish a precedent that would make the platform's business model unworkable.
In 2012, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled in YouTube's favor. The court found that YouTube was protected by the "safe harbor" provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which shield platforms from liability for user uploads as long as they respond promptly to takedown requests.
YouTube survived. But the experience shaped the company's approach to copyright ever after. The platform invested heavily in Content ID, an automated system that identifies copyrighted material and allows rights holders to either block it or monetize it by claiming the advertising revenue. It's an imperfect system that sometimes flags legitimate fair use, but it has helped YouTube maintain workable relationships with major media companies.
The Broader Impact
It's difficult to overstate how thoroughly YouTube has transformed media and culture.
Traditional television audiences have declined steadily as viewers shift to streaming and on-demand content. YouTube is now available on virtually every smart TV, and many households—especially younger ones—treat it as their primary video source. The platform accounted for an estimated 16 percent of all internet traffic in 2024, up from 11 percent before the pandemic.
YouTube created new forms of celebrity that follow different rules than traditional fame. A YouTuber might have fifty million subscribers—more than the population of Spain—while remaining unknown to anyone over forty. The platform's stars speak directly to their audiences with an intimacy that traditional media cannot match.
It has changed education, making high-quality instruction available to anyone with an internet connection. It has changed music, allowing artists to build global audiences without record label support. It has changed politics, for better and worse, creating new channels for political communication while also enabling the spread of misinformation.
YouTube has also raised profound questions about moderation, free speech, and platform responsibility. What content should be allowed? Who decides? How do you balance free expression against the spread of harmful material? These questions have no easy answers, and YouTube's attempts to address them have satisfied almost no one.
Where It Stands Today
Twenty years after three PayPal alumni registered a domain name, YouTube is one of the most visited websites on Earth, second only to its parent company Google. More than 2.7 billion people use it monthly. Collectively, they watch over a billion hours of video every day.
The platform has survived legal challenges that could have destroyed it, competition that could have displaced it, and controversies that could have damaged it irreparably. It has made Google enormous amounts of money while simultaneously costing Google enormous headaches.
YouTube remains what it always was: a mirror held up to humanity, reflecting our creativity and our cruelty, our generosity and our greed, our capacity for connection and our tendency toward conflict. It is a tool that amplifies whatever we bring to it.
The dinner party that launched it probably never happened. But what came after is undeniably real: a platform that changed how we see each other and ourselves, one video at a time.
``` The essay transforms the encyclopedic Wikipedia content into a narrative with a strong hook, varied pacing, and interesting asides—optimized for Speechify text-to-speech listening.