Steve Smith finally talks about the history of YouTube, are you happy?
Episode #6-37 released on May 29, 2016
I have refrained from doing this for a long time, and many users including cartfan-youtube have requested this episode over and over and over again. Well, now I am going to do this episode to appease the masses, today, I talk about the evolution of YouTube. The same platform I publish on.
First, I'd like to point out one fact, without PayPal, there would be no YouTube. The three people responsible for founding YouTube, are early PayPal employees. These founders are Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. The Youtube.com domain name was registered on February 14, 2005.
The first video "Me at the zoo" by Jawed Karim was uploaded April 23, 2005, and currently sits at 31,530,277 views as I am writing these notes. This marks the first official upload for YouTube.
Now, YouTube is partly possible because of a little known fact of technology companies, especially for the usual consumer of content online, Angel Funding. Venture firm, Sequoia Capital, which invested $3.5 million in November 2005, which the operation was still running in make shift garage.
The biggest additions to YouTube in 2005, that are still with us, the Fullscreen View, Subscriptions, Playlists.
In April 2006, former CFO of PayPal, Roelof Botha, and joined the Board of Directors. Artis Capital Management put an additional $8 million in angel funds in YouTube, as well. And, in 2006, they gave us Personalized Profiles, Video Responses, Cellphone Uploading, Viewing History, and more.
Then came October 9, 2006. Up until this point, YouTube, was its own entity, but Google changed this by buying YouTube for $1.65Billion USD in stock. Which came at a good time because they were at the time under threat from media companies for Copyright Issues. I won't go into the details of the claims, but needless to say, the media industry still has taken the hint that people want access to the content they want, void of location on the planet.
From 2007, to today, we enjoy many improvements to the YouTube platform including video analytics, audio swap, thumb ratings, 4K video, film rentals, 60FPS video, 360-degree video, YouTube partnership, and much more. This, also, brought about the end of Google Video in June 2012, which merged into YouTube to become one.
And from this, I'd like to point out 5 things YouTube has achieved in all that time. 2010 to present, Alexa ranks YouTube as the third most visited Web-site on the Internet. December 4, 2012, Gangnam Style is the first video to achieve a billion views. March 21, 2013, number of unique visitors to YouTube reaches one billion. June 19, 2007, in Paris, Eric E. Schmidt, launched new localization system which allows users to be viewed in localized versions depending on your location in the world. And, in May 2013, YouTube launched a pilot program, which allows some content providers the ability to charge $0.99 or more for content on YouTube. The grand majority remain free to this day.
And, as a last detail, do a simple search, and you will find that over 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute as of November 13, 2015. Projections sit at the possibility of 800 hours of content uploaded to the platform by beginning of October 2016.
Host : Steve Smith | Music : Jonny Lee Hart | Editor : Steve Smith | Producer : Zed Axis Productions