YouTube

YouTube was founded in February 2005 by three former PayPal employees: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. Recognising that sharing videos online was difficult and required technical expertise, they created a platform to democratise video sharing with the slogan "Broadcast Yourself". The first video, "Me at the zoo" featuring Karim at the San Diego Zoo, was uploaded on April 23, 2005. The site officially launched to the public in November 2005 and experienced explosive growth, serving over 100 million videos per day by July 2006. In October 2006, just 18 months after launch, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock, providing the infrastructure needed to support its rapid expansion.

YouTube's early years were marked by copyright challenges, particularly Viacom's $1 billion lawsuit in 2007. In response, YouTube developed Content ID, a system allowing copyright holders to identify and manage their content. More significantly, the 2007 launch of the YouTube Partner Program transformed the platform by allowing creators to share in advertising revenue, establishing the foundation of a new creator economy. This turned video creation into a viable career and spawned a generation of internet celebrities and entrepreneurs who built businesses around YouTube content.

The platform achieved numerous milestones over the following years: reaching 1 trillion views in 2011, hosting "Gangnam Style" as the first video to hit 1 billion views in 2012, and launching YouTube Red (later Premium) in 2015 for ad-free viewing. By 2017, YouTube had 1.5 billion logged-in monthly users watching over 1 billion hours of video daily. The COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 accelerated growth further, and YouTube launched Shorts to compete with TikTok's short-form video format. The founders left the company by 2010 to pursue other ventures, with Hurley and Chen co-founding AVOS Systems while Karim became an investor at Stanford.

Today, YouTube is the world's second-most visited website with over 2 billion monthly logged-in users across 100 countries and 80 languages. More than 500 hours of video are uploaded every minute, covering everything from entertainment and education to news and commerce. YouTube has fundamentally changed how we consume media, learn new skills, and connect with each other, democratising media creation and transforming industries from music to education. Despite facing challenges around misinformation, radicalisation, and content moderation, YouTube remains essential infrastructure for the internet age, shaping global culture and commerce in ways its founders could hardly have imagined when they started in 2005.