This first YouTube viral video was a clip of Brazilian soccer player Ronaldinho receiving a pair of Golden Boots. This was a Nike ad that went and gone viral. In May of 2005, the beta version of YouTube was up on the net, and within a month, the very first video was posted. It was titled, 'Me at the Zoo,' and was a 19-second long clip posted by Karim himself. The video featured footage of Karim at the San Diego Zoo, talking about elephants and their trunks.īy September of 2005, YouTube had managed to get its first video with one million views. “People were collecting video clips on their cell phones … but there was no easy way to share. “Video, we felt, really wasn’t being addressed on the Internet,” said Chad Hurley in an early interview. Source: jawed/YouTubeĪccording to its founders, the idea was born at a dinner party in San Fransisco, about a year earlier, in 2004. The trio was frustrated by how hard it was, at the time, to find and share video clips online. The platform, like so many others in Silicon Valley, began as an angel-funded enterprise with makeshift offices in a garage. It was the brainchild of Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were all former employees of Paypal. YouTube was founded on Valentine's Day in 2005. Thanks to things like YouTube's Partner Program and Google's AdSense, a few people can actually create successful careers as YouTubers. It has since grown to become one of the foremost video distribution sites in the world. Today, many content creators make a decent living by selling ad space before or on videos they create and upload onto the site. It was hoped that users could use the site to upload, share, and view content without restriction. YouTube was originally created as a platform for anyone to post any video content they desired. What was the original purpose of YouTube? It has also enabled the creation of an entirely new profession - YouTube content creator, which can be a very profitable career for some YouTubers around the world.

Youtube backgrounds