YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal.[7] 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.[8]
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 commented 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".[9]
Karim said the inspiration for YouTube first came from Janet Jackson’s role in the 2004 Super Bowl incident, when her breast was exposed during her performance, and later from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Karim could not easily find video clips of either event online, which led to the idea of a video sharing site.[10] 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.[11][12] The YouTube logo from launch until 2011, featuring its former slogan Broadcast Yourself
YouTube began as a venture-funded technology startup, primarily from a$11.5 million investment by Sequoia Capital between November 2005 and April 2006.[13] YouTube’s early headquarters were situated above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California.[14] The domain name https://youtube.com was activated on February 14, 2005, and the website was developed over the subsequent months.[15]
The first YouTube video, titled Me at the zoo, shows co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo.[16] The video was uploaded on April 23, 2005, and can still be viewed on the site.[17]
YouTube offered the public a beta test of the site in May 2005. The first video to reach one million views was a Nike advertisement featuring Ronaldinho in September 2005. Following a$3.5 million investment from Sequoia Capital in November, the site launched officially on December 15, 2005, by which time the site was receiving 8 million views a day.[18][19] 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.[20] According to data published by market research company comScore, YouTube is the dominant provider of online video in the United States, with a market share of around 43% and more than 14 billion views of videos in May 2010.[21]
In 2014 YouTube said that 300 hours of new videos were uploaded to the site every minute, [22] three times more than one year earlier[23] and that around three quarters of the material comes from outside the U.S.[24][25][26] The site has 800 million unique users a month.[27] It is estimated that in 2007 YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000.[28] According to third-party web analytics providers, Alexa and SimilarWeb, YouTube is the third most visited website in the world, as of June 2015; SimilarWeb also lists YouTube as the top TV and video website globally, attracting more than 15 billion visitors per month.[3][29][30]
The choice of the name https://youtube.com led to problems for a similarly named website, https://utube.com. The 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 has since changed the name of its website to https://utubeonline.com.[31][32]
In October 2006, Google Inc. announced that it had acquired YouTube for$1.65 billion in Google stock, and the deal was finalized on November 13, 2006.[33] YouTube’s headquarters as of 2010 in San Bruno, California
In March 2010, YouTube began free streaming of certain content, including 60 cricket matches of the Indian Premier League. According to YouTube, this was the first worldwide free online broadcast of a major sporting event.[34]
On March 31, 2010, the YouTube website launched a new design, with the aim of simplifying the interface and increasing the time users spend on the site. Google product manager Shiva Rajaraman commented: "We really felt like we needed to step back and remove the clutter."[35] In May 2010, it was reported that YouTube was serving more than two billion videos a day, which it described as "nearly double the prime-time audience of all three major US television networks combined".[36] In May 2011, YouTube reported in its company blog that the site was receiving more than three billion views per day.[25] In January 2012, YouTube stated that the figure had increased to four billion videos streamed per day.[24]
In October 2010, 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.[37]