YouTube Rewind

     It's been a long day of work, classes, and homework. I open my computer and hop on YouTube to catch up on what my favorite creators have been working on for the past few weeks. Vlogs, cooking videos, look-books, clothing hauls, skincare tips, gaming videos. You name it, it's in my subscription tab. I scroll through the long list of brightly colored thumbnails and open all the videos in new tabs that I want to watch. I have a lot of content to watch and I can't wait to catch up with my "internet friends" on YouTube!

    The Beta site Youtube was first launched in May of 2005, but that is not the origin story of YouTube. The concept of creating a video sharing platform was birthed a year before YouTube’s official launch. Former PayPal employees-Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim came up with the idea in 2004 while attending a dinner party in San Francisco. They discussed how difficult it was to find videos online and how beneficial it would be to have a public site that housed these shareable videos. Years later, in an interview, Karim explained how the idea was sparked from the Janet Jackson Super Bowl incident as well as the tsunami in December.

    

    The startup idea for YouTube received $11.5 million in investments in 2005 (Exford, 2020). On February 14th, 2005 the domain, trademark and logo were created and the headquarters was registered at an address above a pizzeria in California (Exford, 2020). On April 23rd, 2005 the first-ever video was uploaded by Karim named 'Me at the Zoo' the run time of the video was only 19 seconds but today has almost 115 million views. After the Beta testing period, YouTube.com launched to the public on December 15th, 2005 and the first video to climb past 1 million views was a Nike commercial showing Brazilian soccer player Ronaldinho receiving his pair of Golden Boots (Office Timeline, 2018). This advertisement attracted a ton of traffic to the site as well as put Nike’s in a great light with potential YouTube’s promotion (Office Timeline, 2018). 

    Fast forward to 2006, the site had only been accessible to the public for a year and had already grown extremely quickly. The site piqued Google's interest and was bought for $1.65 billion dollars (Exford, 2020). Compared to other sites, YouTube was still relatively small and only popular in the United States compared to other sites in 2006, and especially in comparison to its size today. Through the Google acquisition, YouTube launched the Partner Program in May 2007 which quickly propelled the sire to what we know it as today. The program allowed everyday people to create content, and get paid from interactions with their content. Users began to direct their content towards viewers to an overall better understanding of their interests. People who began their YouTube journey as a hobby could now turn it into a business. Some even earned a six-figure income at the time. In June 2007 the site was finally accessible in 9 other countries including the United Kingdom (Exford, 2020). 

   

    With continuous growth and access to better technology being more commonly widespread in December of 2008, YouTube added the feature of uploading videos in high definition. Over the next few years, YouTube continued to rapidly grow. More and more users started to post regular content and join the bandwagon of becoming a "YouTuber." By 2009 the site was earning over 1 billion views per day. New advertisements were added to the site which allowed creators to earn even more revenue per video. People who wanted to join the YouTube space continued to find different genres to create content. In 2011, vlogging took over YouTube. People became fascinated with the ability to essentially live a day in another person's life. By the end of 2011, the site was earring 3 billion views daily and counting. (Exford, 2020) 

    Since 2012 and beyond, the site has not experienced any major changes other than layout and redesign. The site continues to grow and is the second most visited website in the world. Runner up to Google. The YouTube headquarters is located in San Bruno, California and just the YouTube sector of Google alone employs more than 2000 people (OmniCore, 2020). Today the site gets over 30 million active users daily and 80% of those users are from outside the United States (OmniCore, 2020). 

   Personally, my life has been heavily influenced by YouTube and I am grateful for all that it has taught me. I started avidly watching YouTube around middle school and immediately felt connected to that platform. My love for YouTube ultimately shaped my passion for content creation and social media as a whole. 

    

1) Meet & Greet with YoTuber Colleen Ballinger a.k.a Miranda Sings

2) YouTubes original homepage

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REFERENCES

Exford, A. (2020, March 10). The History of Youtube. Retrieved October 06, 2020, from https://www.engadget.com/2016-11-10-the-history-of-youtube.html 

Office Timeline. (2018, February 11). The Project Planning and Gantt Chart Blog. Retrieved October 06, 2020, from https://www.officetimeline.com/blog/youtube-history-timeline

OmniCore. (2020, February 10). YouTube by the Numbers: Stats, Demographics & Fun Facts. Retrieved October 06, 2020, from https://www.omnicoreagency.com/youtube-statistics/