YouTube

In the early 2000s, despite the spread of ADSL in developed countries, publishing a personal video on the Web remained technically complex: incompatible formats, proprietary players, expensive hosting. Three former PayPal employees — Chad Hurley, head of design, Steve Chen, engineer, and Jawed Karim, developer — perceived this gap at a party in early 2005 in San Francisco. They registered the domain name youtube.com on 14 February 2005 and filed the articles of incorporation in California. The site began running in beta in April 2005. The very first video, entitled "Me at the zoo", was uploaded by Karim on 23 April 2005; it lasted nineteen seconds and showed its author in front of the elephants at the San Diego Zoo. The service rested on a simple technical and ergonomic bet: users could freely upload videos, which YouTube automatically transcoded to the Flash Video (FLV) format and played back via a lightweight embedded player inside an HTML page. Anyone could embed the video on their blog or site through a simple <embed> tag. The site opened publicly in November 2005 and quickly recorded millions of daily views. A fundraising round of 11.5 million dollars led by Sequoia Capital in November 2005 funded growth. As early as October 2006, Google acquired YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars in shares, a key operation that consolidated the advertising-based business model. Within two decades YouTube has become the second most visited platform in the world after Google Search, with more than two billion logged-in users, several hundred hours of video uploaded every minute and a whole economy of creators paid through AdSense. The Partner Program, launched in 2007, allowed individual channels to become professional media outlets. The platform has transformed music (clips, remixes, artist discovery), entertainment, education (MOOCs, tutorials) and citizen journalism. It stands as one of the most striking innovations of the Web 2.0 era, alongside Facebook, Wikipedia and Twitter.