YouTube is an American online video sharing and social media platform launched by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim in February 2005. Its users watch more than one billion hours of videos each day.[7] YouTube content creators, popularly referred to as YouTubers, upload over 500 hours of content per minute.[8]
In October 2006, YouTube was bought by Google for $1.65 billion.[9] It has since evolved from a small video streaming platform to a large service influencing popular culture, internet trends, and creating multimillionaire celebrities. YouTube has reported revenues of $19.8 billion in 2020.[1] After Google, YouTube is the most visited website worldwide, with over one billion monthly users.[10] Google's ownership of YouTube has also changed its business model; it no longer generates revenue from advertisements alone. YouTube now offers paid content such as movies and exclusive content. YouTube and approved creators participate in Google's AdSense program, which generates more revenue for both parties.
YouTube has expanded beyond the website into mobile apps, network television, and to permitting other services like Discord and Nintendo to be linked to it. The range of videos on YouTube includes music videos, video clips, short films, feature films, documentaries, audio recordings, corporate sponsored movie trailers, live streams, vlogs, as well as content from popular YouTubers. Most content is generated by individuals, including collaborations between YouTubers and companies that sponsor them. Since around 2015, established media corporations such as Disney, ViacomCBS, and WarnerMedia have created and expanded their corporate YouTube channels to promote their content to a larger audience. YouTube also acts as a social network by allowing users with a Google account to watch and upload their own videos, comment on videos, rate and respond to comments, like or dislike videos, create playlists, and subscribe to other users and channels.
With billions of hours of content and thousands of niche groups, YouTube has also had a great social impact. As it has grown and evolved, it has become involved in many controversies that have made headline news such as its self-censorship, alleged corporate favoritism, allowing its users to spread conspiracy theories, and issues regarding child safety and wellbeing.
History
Founding and initial growth (2005–2006)
YouTube was founded by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. The trio were all early employees of PayPal, which left them enriched after the company was bought by eBay.[11] Hurley had studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.[12]
There are multiple stories told of the company's founding. According to a story that has often been repeated in the media, Hurley and Chen developed the idea for YouTube during the early months of 2005, after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen's apartment in San Francisco. Karim did not attend the party and denied that it had occurred, but Chen remarked that the idea that YouTube was founded after a dinner party "was probably very strengthened by marketing ideas around creating a story that was very digestible".[13]
Karim said the inspiration for YouTube first came from the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show controversy, when Janet Jackson's breast was briefly exposed by Justin Timberlake during the halftime show. Karim could not easily find video clips of the incident and 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami online, which led to the idea of a video sharing site.[14] Hurley and Chen said that the original idea for YouTube was a video version of an online dating service, and had been influenced by the website Hot or Not.[13][15] They created posts on Craigslist asking attractive women to upload videos of themselves to YouTube in exchange for a $100 reward.[16] Difficulty in finding enough dating videos led to a change of plans, with the site's founders deciding to accept uploads of any type of video.[17]
YouTube began as a venture capital–funded technology startup. Between November 2005 and April 2006, the company raised money from a variety of investors with Sequoia Capital, $11.5 million, and Artis Capital Management, $8 million, being the largest two.[11][18] YouTube's early headquarters were situated above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California.[19] In February 2005, the company activated www.youtube.com.[20] The first video was uploaded April 23, 2005. Titled Me at the zoo, it shows co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo and can still be viewed on the site.[21][22] In May, the company launched a public beta and by November, a Nike ad featuring Ronaldinho became the first video to reach one million total views.[23][24] The site launched officially on December 15, 2005, by which time the site was receiving 8 million views a day.[25][26] Clips at the time were limited to 100 megabytes, as little as 30 seconds of footage.[27]
Contrary to popular belief, YouTube was not the first video-sharing site on the Internet; Vimeo was launched in November 2004, though that site remained a side project of its developers from CollegeHumor at the time and did not grow much, either.[28] The week of YouTube's launch, NBC-Universal's Saturday Night Live ran a skit "Lazy Sunday" by The Lonely Island. Besides helping to bolster ratings and long-term viewership for Saturday Night Live, "Lazy Sunday"'s status as an early viral video helped establish YouTube as an important website.[29] Unofficial uploads of the skit to YouTube drew in more than five million collective views by February 2006 before they were removed when NBCUniversal requested it two months later based on copyright concerns.[30] Despite eventually being taken down, these duplicate uploads of the skit helped popularize YouTube's reach and led to the upload of more third-party content.[31][32] The site grew rapidly and, in July 2006, the company announced that more than 65,000 new videos were being uploaded every day, and that the site was receiving 100 million video views per day.[33]
The choice of the name www.youtube.com led to problems for a similarly named website, www.utube.com. That site's owner, Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment, filed a lawsuit against YouTube in November 2006 after being regularly overloaded by people looking for YouTube. Universal Tube subsequently changed its website towww.utubeonline.com.[34][35]
Broadcast Yourself Era (2006–2013)
On October 9, 2006, Google announced that it had acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock.[36][37] The deal was finalized on November 13, 2006.[38][39] Google's acquisition launched new newfound interest in video-sharing sites; IAC, which now owned Vimeo, focused on supporting the content creators to distinguish itself from YouTube.[28]
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The company experienced rapid growth. The Daily Telegraph wrote that in 2007, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000.[40] By 2010, the company had reached a market share of around 43% and more than 14 billion views of videos, according to comScore.[41] That year, the company simplified its interface in order to increase the time users would spend on the site.[42] In 2011, more than three billion videos were being watched each day with 48 hours of new videos uploaded every minute.[43][44][45] However, most of these views came from a relatively small number of videos; according to a software engineer at that time, 30% of videos accounted for 99% of views on the site.[46] That year, the company again changed its interface and at the same time, introduced a new logo with a darker shade of red.[47][48] A subsequent interface change, designed to unify the experience across desktop, TV, and mobile, was rolled out in 2013.[49] By that point, more than 100 hours were being uploaded every minute, a number that would increase to 300 hours by November 2014.[50][51]
During this time, the company also went through some organizational changes. In October 2006, YouTube moved to a new office in San Bruno, California.[52] Hurley announced that he would be stepping down as chief executive officer of YouTube to take an advisory role, and that Salar Kamangar would take over as head of the company in October 2010.[53]
YouTube's New CEO (2014–2018)
Susan Wojcicki was appointed CEO of YouTube in February 2014.[54] In January 2016, YouTube expanded its headquarters in San Bruno by purchasing an office park for $215 million. The complex has 51,468 square metres (554,000 square feet) of space and can house up to 2,800 employees.[55] YouTube officially launched the "polymer" redesign of its user interfaces based on Material Design language as its default, as well a redesigned logo that is built around the service's play button emblem in August 2017.[56]
Through this period, YouTube tried several new ways to generate revenue beyond advertisements. In 2013, YouTube launched a pilot program for content providers to offer premium, subscription-based channels within the platform.[57][58] This effort was discontinued in January 2018 and relaunched in June, with US$4.99 channel subscriptions.[59][60] These channel subscriptions complemented the existing Super Chat ability, launched in 2017, which allows viewers to donate between $1 and $500 to have their comment highlighted.[61] In 2014, YouTube announced a subscription service known as "Music Key," which bundled ad-free streaming of music content on YouTube with the existing Google Play Music service.[62] The service continued to evolve in 2015, when YouTube announced YouTube Red, a new premium service that would offer ad-free access to all content on the platform (succeeding the Music Key service released the previous year), premium original series, and films produced by YouTube personalities, as well as background playback of content on mobile devices. YouTube also released YouTube Music, a third app oriented towards streaming and discovering the music content hosted on the YouTube platform.[63][64][65]
The company also attempted to create products to appeal to specific kinds of viewers. YouTube released a mobile app known as YouTube Kids in 2015, designed to provide an experience optimized for children. It features a simplified user interface, curated selections of channels featuring age-appropriate content, and parental control features.[66] Also in 2015, YouTube launched YouTube Gaming—a video gaming-oriented vertical and app for videos and live streaming, intended to compete with the Amazon.com-owned Twitch.[67]
Consolidation, censorship and controversy (2018–present)
The company was attacked on April 3, 2018, when a shooting took place at YouTube's headquarters in San Bruno, California, which wounded four and resulted in one death (the shooter).[68] By February 2017, one billion hours of YouTube were watched every day, and 400 hours of video were uploaded every minute.[7][69] Two years later, the uploads increased to more than 500 hours per minute.[8] During the COVID-19 pandemic, when most of the world was under stay-at-home orders, usage of services such as YouTube grew greatly. One data firm estimated that YouTube was accounting for 15% of all internet traffic, twice its pre-pandemic level.[70] In response to EU officials requesting that such services reduce bandwidth as to make sure medical entities had sufficient bandwidth to share information, YouTube along with Netflix stated they would reduce streaming quality for at least thirty days as to cut bandwidth use of their services by 25% to comply with the EU's request.[71] YouTube later announced that they would continue with this move worldwide: "We continue to work closely with governments and network operators around the globe to do our part to minimize stress on the system during this unprecedented situation."[72]
Following a 2018 complaint alleging violations of the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA),[73] the company was fined $170 million by the FTC for collecting personal information from minors under the age of 13.[74] YouTube was also ordered to create systems to increase children's privacy.[75][76] Following criticisms of its implementation of those systems, YouTube started treating all videos designated as "made for kids" as liable under COPPA on January 6, 2020.[77][78] Joining the YouTube kids app, the company created a supervised mode, designed more for tweens in 2021.[79]
During this period, YouTube also got into disputes with other tech companies. For over a year, in 2018 and 2019, there was no YouTube app available for Amazon Fire products, and in 2020, Roku was forced to remove the app from its streaming store after the two companies couldn't come to an agreement.[80][81]
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