YouTube Launches: The Birth of Viral Video

Three former PayPal employees registered the domain youtube.com on February 14, 2005 — Valentine’s Day — not because of any romantic impulse but because they wanted to build a video dating site where users could upload clips of themselves. The dating concept failed immediately. What replaced it was something far more consequential: a platform that would democratize video distribution, reshape global media, and make "going viral" a phrase understood in every language on earth. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim had worked together at PayPal and recognized that sharing video online was absurdly difficult in 2005. Emailing video files was impractical due to size limits. Hosting them required technical knowledge. There was no simple equivalent of what Flickr had done for photos. The three founders built a site where anyone could upload, share, and embed video with a few clicks. The first video, "Me at the zoo" — a 19-second clip of Karim standing in front of elephants at the San Diego Zoo — was uploaded on April 23, 2005. The site launched in beta in May and publicly in December. Growth was explosive: by July 2006, YouTube was serving 100 million video views per day. Users uploaded everything from home movies to pirated television clips to original content that no traditional media company would have touched. Google acquired YouTube on October 9, 2006, for $1.65 billion in stock — a price that seemed extravagant for an eighteen-month-old company that had never turned a profit. It proved to be one of the shrewdest acquisitions in business history. By the mid-2020s, YouTube generated over $30 billion in annual advertising revenue and had become the world’s second-largest search engine, second only to Google itself. A failed dating site became the largest repository of human expression ever assembled, proving that when you give ordinary people the tools to broadcast, they will produce more content in a year than all of television history combined.