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Founding and Initial Growth (2005 - 2006) : From Left To Right:, And, The Founders of Youtube

The document discusses the founding and initial growth of YouTube from 2005-2006. It describes how YouTube was founded by three former PayPal employees and details the site's early growth, including key events and funding rounds. It also covers YouTube's acquisition by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion.

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pujari sai kumar babu
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64 views2 pages

Founding and Initial Growth (2005 - 2006) : From Left To Right:, And, The Founders of Youtube

The document discusses the founding and initial growth of YouTube from 2005-2006. It describes how YouTube was founded by three former PayPal employees and details the site's early growth, including key events and funding rounds. It also covers YouTube's acquisition by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion.

Uploaded by

pujari sai kumar babu
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Founding and initial growth (2005–2006)

From left to right: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, the founders of YouTube

YouTube was founded by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. The trio were all early
employees of PayPal which they left enriched after the company was bought by eBay.[13] 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.[14]
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 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".[15] 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.[16] 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.[15][17] They created posts on Craigslist asking attractive women to upload
videos of themselves to YouTube in exchange for a $100 reward.[18] 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.[19]

The YouTube logo was used from its launch until 2011. Another version of this logo without their
"Broadcast Yourself" slogan was used until 2015.

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.[13][20] YouTube's
early headquarters were situated above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo,
California.[21] In February 2005 the company activated www.youtube.com .[22]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.[23][24] 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.[25][26] The site launched officially on December 15, 2005, by which time the site was
receiving 8 million views a day.[27][28] Clips at the time were limited to 100 megabytes, as little as
30 seconds of footage.[29]
YouTube was not the first video-sharing site on the Internet, as 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.[30] 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 established YouTube as an important website.[31] 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 month later based on copyright
concerns.[32] Despite eventually being taken down, these duplicate uploads of the skit helped
popularize YouTube's reach and led to the upload of further third-party content.[33][34] 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.[35]
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 to www.utubeonline.com .[36][37]

Acquisition by Google (2006–2013)

YouTube's headquarters in San Bruno, California

On October 9, 2006, Google announced that it had acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google
stock.[38][39] The deal was finalized on November 13, 2006.[40][41] Google's acquisition launched new
newfound interest in video-sharing sites; IAC, which now owned Vimeo focused on supporting
the content creator to distinguish itself from YouTube.[30]

YouTube logo from 2015 until 2017

The company experienced rapid growth. The Daily Telegraph wrote that in 2007, YouTube
consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in 2000.[42] By 2010, the company had
reached a market share of around 43% and more than 14 billion views of videos according
to comScore.[43] That year the company also redesigned its interface with the aim of simplifying
the interface and increasing the time users spend on the site.[44] In 2011, more than three billion
videos were being watched each day with 48 hours of new videos uploaded every
minute.[45][46][47] 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.[48] That year the company again changed its interface and at the sametime introduced a new
logo with a darker shade of red.[49][50] A further interface change, designed to unify the experience
across desktop, TV, and mobile, was rolled out in 2013.[51] By that point more than 100 hours
were being uploaded every minute, a number that would increase to 300 hours by November
2014.[52][53]
During this time, the company also went through some organizational changes. In October 2006,
YouTube moved to a new office in San Bruno, California.[54] 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.[55]

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