YouTube began when Ebay employees started to create a video-sharing website on which users could upload, share, and view videos. The Internet domain name youtube.com was activated on February 15, 2005. YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal. Prior to PayPal, Hurley studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. YouTube's early headquarters were situated above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California. The inventors became millionaires when they sold their invention for 1.65 billion dollars to the search engine Google. In 2006, less than a year of being in operation, YouTube was purchased by Google allowing all users that have Google accounts such as Gmail to log into YouTube using their existing Google credentials. Although the company was purchased it operates as it did before with the founders holding their original positions while YouTube continues to operate independently.
YouTube is the most popular video sharing sites on the Internet and YouTube contains over 83.4 million videos. This article will tell you exactly who invented YouTube and also tell you some facts about YouTube. The first video was uploaded to YouTube on April 23, 2005, and was called “Me at the zoo.” The website took off over the next 15 months so that by July 2006, over 65,000 videos were being added each day. That summer, YouTube was listed as the fastest-growing website in the world, and the 5th most-popular. In November of that year, Google bought the company for $1.65 billion. Of that total, Hurley received $345 million, Chen received $326 million and Karim received $64 million. Karim said the inspiration for YouTube first came from Janet Jackson's role in the 2004 Super Bowl incident, when her breast was exposed during her performance, and later from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. Karim could not easily find video clips of either event online, which led to the idea of a video sharing site. Hurley and Chen said that the original idea for YouTube was a video version of an online dating service, and had been influenced by the website Hot or Not.
YouTube began as a venture-funded technology startup, primarily from a 11.5 million dollars investment by Sequoia Capital between November 2005 and April 2006. YouTube's early headquarters were situated above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California. The domain name YouTube was activated on February 15, 2005, and the website was developed over the subsequent months.
