Blog #4: History of Youtube

 The History of Youtube; The Biggest Video Sharing Platform in the World

If you look at technology as a whole Youtube is still on the newer side of it. YouTube launched on February 14th, 2005. The streaming platform was created by three men who all worked at PayPal together, Jawed Karim, Chad Hurley, and Steven Chen.  The idea was proposed by Karim to Chen and Hurley at a dinner party.  It was not supposed to be the video platform that we all know, love, and use daily. The original concept was for the service to be a dating app, but that quickly feel though. Than they created a new concept for the company, “They had the idea that ordinary people would enjoy sharing their “home videos.””.

On April 23rd, 2005, history was made. The first ever Youtube video was posted by one of the creators himself, Jawed Karim. On the channel called Jawed. As of today, September 27, 2023 the video has amounted 287,462,680 million views, 14 million likes, and 11,116,775 million comments. As well as Karim’s channel (Jawed) has around 4 million subscribers. This alone should show how massive the Youtube operation is. In that same year another major milestone was accomplished. The first video to reach 1 million views, Nike’s advertisement showcasing one of the world best soccer players Ronaldinho. In this video the star player is awarded the golden boot, the most coveted award in all of soccer. Unfortunately, the original video is no longer on the site for unknown reason, but there are re-uploads with similar view counts. All within the first year launch the site has been blowing up. 2006, the following year after launch Youtube was bought by Google for $1.65 billion. 

In 2007, Youtube created a partnership program for the creators. This program allowed for creators to get their videos monetized. This paved a new path in the job hunt, people for getting paid for just posting videos as long as they managed to get views. Nothing major happen to the site again until 2009. In 2009, the Youtube corporation won the Peabody award. “Since 2005, millions of people in 19 regions around the globe have answered YouTube‘s call to “Broadcast Yourself.” Indeed, 10 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every 60 seconds. Hundreds of millions of videos are viewed each day. With an endless stream of content that ranges from banal to breathtaking, YouTube is the place online where audiences flock for news and entertainment. But YouTube is more than just the world’s most popular online viewing community. YouTube has become our speakers’ corner, promoting a free exchange of ideas, expressed in video formats, around the world. Through YouTube, important information is often widely dispersed before it reaches conventional electronic channels. Moreover, it has become an international video library, an archive making many of media’s greatest achievements instantly available to one and all. In all these ways, YouTube has transformed electronic media. It’s selection continues the tradition of the Peabody Award, a tradition committed to a free press, to free speech and to the use of electronic media as a form of public service for all citizens.”. This is important because the Peabody award is considered to be “an honor like no other” it is only give to the best of the best in the entertainment industry. Also in 2009, Youtube was raking in about 1 billion views per day.

In 2011, Youtube Live was launched. Youtube live was a site where people could livestream themselves going what they please. Such as, playing video games, cooking, or even just talking to the camera with a live audience. Fast forward to 2012, the first video to ever reach 1 billion views. It was the music video of the song Gangnam Style by Psy. This is a massive accomplishment not only for the artist Psy but also for Youtube. Later in 2015, Youtube release another new service called Youtube Red. Youtube Red was a paid subscription service, similar to Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime+. In 2018 Youtube Red was rebranded to Youtube Premium. 

Now let’s jump to just last year, 2022. YouTube was deemed the second most poplar social network worldwide just behind Facebook. Today in 2023, Youtube has around 122 million site visitors per day, around 50% of the internet used Youtube once a month, and has generated around $14.4 billion in 2023.