YouTube is one of the largest and most popular video distribution platforms on the Internet.
It was registered on February 14, 2005 Valentine's Day , by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, three former employees of the American e-commerce company PayPal
According to its founders, the idea was born at a dinner party in San Fransisco, about a year earlier, in 2004. The trio was frustrated by how hard it was, at the time, to find and share video clips online.
According to its founders, the idea was born at a dinner party in San Fransisco, about a year earlier, in 2004. The trio was frustrated by how hard it was, at the time, to find and share video clips online.
The very first video was posted. It was titled, "Me at the Zoo," and was a 19-second long clip posted by Karim himself. The video featured footage of Karim at the San Diego Zoo, talking about elephants and their trunks.
By September of 2005, YouTube had managed to get its first video with one million views. This was a Nike ad that went and gone viral. This first YouTube viral video was a clip of Brazilian soccer player Ronaldinho receiving a pair of Golden Boots.
In 2005 the American search engine company Google Inc. had launched a video service, Google Video, but it failed to generate much traffic, and Google was prompted to purchase YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock in November 2006.
The first targeted advertising on the site came in February 2006 in the form of participatory video ads. The first such ad was for the Fox show Prison Break
The company is headquartered in San Bruno, California.
On January 2006 more than 25 million Video views per day.
It is estimated that in 2007, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000.