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Friday, February 14, 2020

YouTube celebrates its 15th anniversary

© Mark Ollig 


It seems, most important discoveries are invented inside someone’s garage, and Chad Hurley’s garage is where YouTube originated.

The domain name, www.youtube.com, was established Feb. 14, 2005, at 9:13 p.m., by three PayPal employees: Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steven Chen.

Hard to believe it has already been 15 years.

Of course, 15 years might seem like an eternity to the younger people; however, for those from my generation, it’s like yesterday.

Trivia: What was the first video to be uploaded to YouTube?

“Me at the Zoo” was uploaded by YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim (username: jawed) April 23, 2005.

Karim’s 19-second video clip was taken at the San Diego Zoo in front of a corral containing a few elephants.

During this short video, a 25-year-old Karim says the following:

“All right, so here we are in front of the elephants. The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really, long trunks, and that’s cool. And that’s pretty much all there is to say.”

As of Tuesday, “Me at the Zoo” had 84.8 million views and 2.7 million comments.

Just 19 months after that first YouTube video, Karim, Hurley, and Chen sold their interests in YouTube.

At the time, YouTube was based in San Mateo, CA, and later headquartered in San Bruno.

Those interested in buying YouTube included Yahoo! Inc., Microsoft, and Google.

The final offer accepted was from Google.

Google also had its start from inside a garage, and was incorporated Sept. 4, 1998, in Menlo Park, CA.

The deal was done with the Google and YouTube folks, sitting in a booth at a Denny’s restaurant near YouTube’s headquarters.

“This is the next step in the evolution of the Internet,” said Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive officer, about the YouTube acquisition.

Google purchased YouTube for $1.65 billion Nov. 13, 2006.

Imagine all the Denny’s Super Slam breakfast specials one could buy with $1.65 billion.

At the time of the YouTube acquisition, Google operated an online video service at www.videogoogle.com. This website went online three weeks before YouTube was founded.

“The videos submitted contribute to this ever-growing online video vault,” I wrote in an October 2006 column about YouTube.

Not only are those cute kitten and doggie videos posted on YouTube popular, but there are also countless educational, historical, product reviews, and various tutorials on every subject imaginable.

During the last five years, Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) videos have become popular, as well.

For 2019, the top video categories watched are comedy, music, entertainment/pop culture, and “how to.”

Three years after the purchase of YouTube, video.google.com stopped accepting video uploads and instructed its users to migrate their videos over to Google’s YouTube website.

Google shut down www.video.google.com Aug. 20, 2012.

Today, almost 5 billion videos are watched on YouTube every day by 1.3 billion people.

There are 2 billion registered users on YouTube.

YouTube ranks second as the most popular social media platform; Facebook is first.

YouTube supports 80 different languages, so users all over the world can navigate through it.

In 2019, 62 percent of businesses used YouTube to post their video content.

More than 70 percent of YouTube videos are watched on mobile devices.

Some 720,000 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every day, which breaks down to 30,000 videos each hour.

For you couch potatoes out there, this means it would take nearly 82 years to watch all the videos uploaded to YouTube in a single day.

During an average month, eight out of 10 people 18 to 49 years old are watching YouTube.

The current value of YouTube is estimated at upwards of $40 billion.

Google got a good return on their investment of $1.65 billion.

Today, Google’s net worth is around $300 billion.

Alphabet Inc., a multinational conglomerate and the parent company of Google, has a current value of just over $1 trillion as of Jan. 16.

Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft are also trillion-dollar corporations.

Will YouTube be here 15 years from now to celebrate its 30th anniversary?

Stay tuned.


“Me at the Zoo” was uploaded by YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim (username: jawed) April 23, 2005.
(First YouTube video)