YouTube Logo

Founded by 3 former PayPal employees, the domain name, www.youtube.com, was activated on Valentines Day, 2005.  Click ahead to see some truly amazing statistics and view the very first video uploaded to YouTube!

YouTube was born as a venture-funded technology start-up, acquiring funding from an $11.5 million investment by Sequoia Capital, with its original headquarters located above a pizza joint and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California. The idea for YouTube came about after its 3 founders, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, encountered difficulty trying to share videos which were shot at an evening dinner party in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Stats

YouTube says that about 60 hours of new videos are uploaded to the site every minute with eight hundred million unique users a month. It is estimated that by 2007, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet did in 2000. Alexa ranks YouTube as the third most visited website on the Internet, behind Google and Facebook. It was bought by Google Inc in October, 2006, for $1.65 Billion in stock. The latest data from last month states that YouTube has roughly four billion videos streamed per day.

Naming Problems

YouTube’s lightning fast growth and increasing presence on the Web created huge problems for a site with a similar name, www.utube.com. This site was overloaded regularly by people online looking for YouTube, which led to a lawsuit in Nov, 2006, by its owners, Universal Tube and Rollform Equipment. The company subsequently changed their online domain name and got out of the way.

The Very First Video On YouTube

The first YouTube video was called Me at the Zoo, and shows co-founder, Jawed Karim, at the San Diego Zoo. The LA Times said: “as the first video uploaded to YouTube, it played a pivotal role in fundamentally altering how people consumed media and helped usher in a golden era of the 60-second video.” It was uploaded on April 23, 2005 and as of November 2011, the video has received over 6 million views.