YouTube
What are YouTube Shorts?
What specialized services does YouTube offer?
Who founded YouTube, and when?
Why did Google acquire YouTube, and how much did it pay?
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YouTube, social media platform and website for sharing videos. It was registered on February 14, 2005, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, three former employees of the American e-commerce company PayPal. The company is headquartered in San Bruno, California.
History
Founding
YouTube initially operated out of Hurley’s garage in California as a video-based dating website, the logo and trademark fittingly registered on Valentine’s Day 2005. It struggled to attract users, however, and the founders changed the direction of the fledgling platform about two months later. Karim uploaded an experimental video to a new version of the platform on April 23, 2005, as part of a test run for its new functions. Titled “Me at the Zoo,” it was a simple 19-second clip of Karim in front of an elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo. It would become the first video uploaded to a platform that grew into the world’s largest video-sharing website.
Shortly after the site opened on a limited (“beta”) basis in May 2005, it was attracting some 30,000 visitors per day. By the time YouTube officially launched on December 15, 2005, it was serving more than 2 million video views each day. By January 2006 that number had increased to more than 25 million views. The number of videos available on the site surpassed 25 million in March 2006, with more than 20,000 new videos uploaded on a daily basis. By the summer of 2006, YouTube was serving more than 100 million videos per day, and the number of videos being uploaded to the site showed no sign of slowing down.
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Growth and acquisition by Google
The immense growth in traffic at YouTube created its own set of problems. The company continually had to purchase more computer equipment and more broadband connections to the Internet. In addition, YouTube was forced to allocate more financial resources for potential litigation, as many media companies discovered that some of the videos uploaded to YouTube contained copyrighted material. With limited success in commercializing its website or containing its growing costs, YouTube began looking for a buyer.
In 2005 the American search engine company Google Inc. had launched a video service, Google Video, but it failed to generate much traffic, and Google was prompted to purchase YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock in November 2006, the highest-value acquisition deal for Google at the time. Rather than merging the websites, however, Google continued YouTube’s operation as before. To reduce the risk of copyright-infringement lawsuits, Google negotiated deals with a number of entertainment companies that would allow copyrighted video material to appear on YouTube and would give YouTube users the right to include certain copyrighted songs in their videos. It also agreed to remove tens of thousands of copyrighted video files from YouTube. In November 2008 Google reached an agreement with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc. (MGM), to show some of the studio’s full-length movies and television shows, the broadcasts being free to watch, with advertisements running alongside the programs.
The acquisition by Google brought a flurry of changes to the video-sharing website. In 2007 Google launched a mobile version of the platform that was tailored to play videos using the limited multimedia capabilities of the cellular phones of the time. Apple also included a custom YouTube application on the first iPhone in 2007, allowing users to stream videos that YouTube had encoded for playback on the device. Also that year YouTube introduced advertisements on the platform, followed by the YouTube Partner Program (YPP), which allowed content creators to earn a share of advertisement revenue for each ad shown with their videos. Creators earn 55 percent of the revenue generated from each advertisement aired on their channel (a page representing people or groups who own uploaded videos). A channel can also add a verification icon next to its name when it crosses 100,000 subscribers. This channel verification is separate from the identity and address verification required for payments: Unverified channels can participate in the YPP but need verification once their earnings cross currency-dependent thresholds.
Features and versions
YouTube allows users to interact with videos through many features. Users can “like” or “dislike” videos, comment on a video and respond to other comments in threads, share videos and channels, subscribe to channels and content creators, and organize content into playlists. It supports several formats, including conventional long-form videos, short vertical clips published as YouTube Shorts, and live feeds with real-time audience interaction. Creators manage their channels through YouTube Studio, which provides tools for uploading videos, editing titles and thumbnails, reviewing audience statistics, moderating comments, and controlling whether content is public, private, or unlisted. YouTube also recognizes channels that reach major subscriber milestones with Creator Awards, plaques that feature a play button design: silver for 100,000 subscribers and gold for 1 million. Diamond and Red Diamond Play Buttons are given for 10 million and 100 million, respectively.
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YouTube also operates several specialized services, such as YouTube TV, a standalone subscription-based streaming service available in the United States. In-built services include YouTube Kids, which provides content exclusively intended for younger viewers. YouTube Premium removes advertisements and allows background and offline playback, while YouTube Music focuses on songs, albums, music videos, and personalized listening. YouTube Movies & TV offers films and television programs for rental or purchase in supported markets. Individuals, groups, companies, and other organizations that produce and upload material to YouTube are generally referred to as content creators. The platform is available through its website and through apps for mobile devices, tablets, smart televisions, streaming devices, and video game consoles.
YouTube’s video quality and accessibility have improved alongside advances in web development and video compression. Early videos played through Adobe Flash, while a mobile version introduced in 2007 supported the limited network access afforded by early web-enabled cell phones. As these devices evolved into smartphones and became commonplace, YouTube adopted more efficient formats for higher-quality streaming and eventually replaced Flash with HTML5 for video delivery in desktop browsers.
Cultural presence
YouTube grew into a hugely popular platform for entertainment and pop culture, capable of turning individual videos and creators into global phenomena. In December 2012 “Gangnam Style” by South Korean musician PSY became the first YouTube video to reach one billion views. As of 2026, Pinkfong’s “Baby Shark Dance” was the platform’s most-viewed video. Popular YouTube creator MrBeast’s channel was its most subscribed, with more than 500 million subscribers, and his short video “Would You Fly to Paris for a Baguette?” was its most-liked upload.
The platform’s scale extends far beyond its record-setting videos. By 2025, more than 20 billion videos had been uploaded to YouTube, with more than 20 million new uploads each day. About three million channels had joined its Partner Program by that year. By 2026 YouTube Shorts alone averaged more than 200 billion views daily, while viewers watched more than one billion hours of YouTube content on television screens each day. The service had localized versions in more than 100 countries and supported 80 languages.
