“Three guys who had nothing to do with St. Valentine “: The unknown story of a tech giant

by

February 14, 2005

YouTube is founded by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, three former PayPal employees. As Chen would later say, the company, now estimated to be worth up to $ 300 billion if sold by Google, was created because “three guys had nothing to do on Valentine’s Day.”

YouTube, then operating through Hurley’s garage in Menlo Park, California, was originally designed as an online dating site. The idea of ​​the three co-founders was to create a platform where users could upload videos, presenting themselves and explaining what they are looking for in a relationship.

But when five days passed and no one had uploaded a single video, the creators of YouTube changed their minds.
“Okay, let’s forget about dating. “Let’s just expand on all the videos,” Chen said of that turnaround, which was to prove to be the key to success.

The first video was uploaded to YouTube on April 23, 2005, by Jawed Karim. Using the username “jawed”, one of the founders posted a video of just 18 seconds, standing in front of the elephants at the San Diego Zoo, talking about their proboscis.

A few months later, in October 2005, a YouTube video broke the 1 million views mark for the first time. This is a viral (for the data of the time) Nike advertisement that shows the Brazilian football player Ronaldinho receiving a pair of “Golden Boots”. The power of YouTube in marketing is now visible.

A year later, on October 9, 2006, after a battle with Yahoo, Google bought YouTube for $ 1.6 billion. The three co-founders each make nearly $ 400 million.

In April 2009, Usher introduced 15-year-old Justin Bieber to the public via a YouTube video. Bieber is releasing the music video for “Baby” next year. It will go down in history as one of the most disliked videos on YouTube, but it will prove that this platform can generate careers.

In October 2009, YouTube announced that it had broken the barrier of 1 billion views per day. At this stage, over 20 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute that passes.

In December 2012, the video for the song “Gangnam Style” became the first to reach 1 billion views, just five months after it was uploaded to the platform. Psy “breaks” the YouTube counter.

In March 2013 YouTube reached 1 billion monthly users and in February 2014 Susan Wojcicki took over as CEO. The 16th employee of Google was the one who convinced the company to acquire YouTube and remains CEO to this day.

Now, 500 hours of content are uploaded to YouTube every minute, while the record for the most viewed video is held by “Baby Shark Dance”.

YouTube has over 2 billion monthly users, watching hundreds of millions of hours of content every day.

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