There is no doubt that everyone knows YouTube, and knows that it is one of the most popular websites among people, and no one will be surprised if we know that millions of users access it daily around the world. YouTube allows everyone to publish various forms of visual content, such as news, movies, music, lectures, educational videos, and more. That is a lot, and what makes it special is that it is interactive that allows commenting on videos and liking, and even reporting the video if it displays offensive material. But in this article we will do a search on YouTube to know how it started, who were its early founders, and how it evolved from an idea at the dinner table To one of the most visited websites in the world.
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The beginning of the establishment
We will go back in the search for YouTube to its early beginnings that go back to 2005, when three young men who worked for PayPal decided to create a platform for sharing videos over the Internet.
These young men had noticed the difficulty of sharing video clips over the Internet, and after they sat at the dinner table one day, they came up with the idea of creating a platform that would make it easier for people to share videos with others.
Their initial idea for YouTube was that it would be a platform where people get to know each other, so each user would upload a video of himself talking about himself and his hobbies and publish it on a small scale among his acquaintances only. But later, the founders saw that it was better for YouTube to be a platform for sharing all kinds of videos, regardless of their content.
Their idea obtained investment support from Sequoia Capital, amounting to $11.5 million. Thus, YouTube was launched on the 14th of February 2005, and their headquarters was just an office above a restaurant in California.
YouTube was attracting about 30 thousand visitors per day after the launch of its initial version, and when it was officially launched, the number of daily views had reached two million views.
The beginning of success
Less than 9 months after its founding, YouTube managed to get its first million views of one video, which was a commercial for Nike shoes. You can view the advertisement here.
In 2005, YouTube also got some important updates. Playlists were added for the first time, videos could be played in full screen, and the “subscribe” button was added.
In February of 2006, Sequoia Capital invested $3.5 million in YouTube. Then, in 2006, the same company, in addition to “Artis Capital Management,” invested $8 million after they saw that YouTube had a bright future.
The three founders of YouTube
It has passed with us that there are three founders of YouTube. But when searching for YouTube, it is necessary to know these three, who they are, and how they met with each other to establish one of the largest websites in the world.
Chad Hurley:
Chad was born in Reading, Pennsylvania, in 1977, and his interest in technology and computers emerged during his high school years.
However, his love for drawing and design prompted him to study fine arts and obtain a BA in 1999 from Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Almost a year and a half after establishing YouTube with his two other companions, Chad decided to sell his share of YouTube to Google for reasons that we will mention to you below, and his share from this deal was about 345.6 million US dollars.
Today, Chad is known as an investor and business manager, and he announced on Twitter in 2021 that he had started an investment in the English football club, Leeds United.
Stephen Chen:
The second name that appears with us when searching for YouTube is Stephen Shih Chen, who was born in 1978 in Taiwan, and who moved with his family to the United States of America when he was eight years old.
After Stephen finished high school, he moved to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to pursue his passion and study computer science. After graduation, he worked at PayPal, where he met Chad Hurley, and then moved on to work with Facebook.
In 2005 Stephen left his job to found YouTube with his two friends, and then got the job of Chief Technology Officer. But he sold his stake to Google in 2006 for more than 625,366 shares in Google.
Stephen had other projects to work on later, but in the end he joined Google to work for the financial institution “Google Ventures”.
Jawed Karim:
Jawed was born in 1979 to a distinguished family. His Bengali-American father was working as a researcher in an American public shareholding company. As for his German mother, she was an associate professor at the University of Minnesota.
Jawed moved with his family from Germany to the United States in 1992, and later began his studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, but before graduation he dropped out to work as an employee at Paypal.
However, during the work period, Jawed decided to go back to university, to obtain a degree in computer science, and then to obtain a master's degree in the same discipline from Stanford University.
In 2006, when friends decided to sell YouTube to Google, Jawed received 137,443 shares valued at more than $64 million.
Perhaps anyone searching for YouTubers would like to know that Jawed Karim was the first YouTuber in the world. In April 2005, Jawed uploaded the first video on YouTube, in which Jawed was standing in front of an elephant cage in a zoo.
Google's acquisition of YouTube
By 2006, YouTube had become a viral icon among people on the Internet. During the first quarter of the year, the number of users grew from 4.9 million users to 19.6 million, an increase of more than 300%. In the seventh month, the company announced that the site was receiving more than 100 million video views per day.
This rapid and massive growth created severe problems for YouTube, the first of which was the need to purchase more computers and Internet connection equipment to provide the service for this huge number of visits. Also, YouTube had run into legal problems that cost it a lot of money due to copyright infringement of some videos and music clips.
Here, the founders o the site were forced to search for a buyer who could cover these huge expenses, and at the same time, the rapid growth of YouTube attracted the attention of the American company Google, which
was working on a platform similar to YouTube that it called Google Videos.
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In the tenth month of 2006, Google announced the purchase of the YouTube platform, and immediately updated the equipment to suit the size of visitors, and concluded some deals with the parties whose copyrights were violated by YouTube, and deleted tens of thousands of videos that violated copyrights.
Google acquired YouTube for more than one and a half billion US dollars, although the number of employees at that time did not exceed 70 employees. Today, YouTube is estimated at $ 160 billion, and employs about 2,000 employees.
The conclusion of the search for YouTube
No one denies that YouTube has added a distinctive color to the Internet space, allowed communities to share their concerns, allowed many scholars to spread their knowledge, and created millions of job opportunities for people of all ages.
But at the conclusion of the search for YouTube, it remains to mention that YouTube is a double-edged sword, as despite its many benefits, it may cause addiction for those who misuse it and do not control themselves from watching offensive materials.
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