- February 1st, 2004, Houston, Texas, 8:30 PM Eastern Standard Time. Over 150 million people
across the United States were watching the annual
Super Bowl halftime show featuring Janet Jackson
and Justin Timberlake. During the show, Justin was supposed to rip
off a layer of Janet's shirt as part of the planned dance choreography. But for some reason, something went wrong, and Justin accidentally
ripped part of her shirt off, and let's just say a
wardrobe malfunction happened on live national television. The incident became a
pretty big news story across the country, and Janet actually got
a lot of shit for it because people felt she
wasn't being modest enough, with many of the outlets
covering the story censoring the video they featured, which, as you could imagine,
frustrated many people, particularly men, for obvious reasons. That same year, a much more devastating
incident occurred in Asia where a huge earthquake
in the Indian Ocean created a massive tsunami
that affected 14 countries just one day after Christmas. It became one of the deadliest
recorded natural disasters in human history, and sure enough, a huge portion
of it was caught on video. Although these incidents are unrelated, at the time, they shared
one thing in common. It was really, really hard to
come across videos of them, even on the internet. At around this time, three young men, Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen, were working for a
company known as PayPal. They were quite satisfied with their jobs. The 2002 acquisition of PayPal by eBay allowed the three employees
to live quite comfortably. Hurley worked as a
designer for the company, even creating the PayPal logo, and Karim and Chen both
worked as software engineers. Needless to say, they
were doing all right, but still, they recognized
this big problem that was occurring online. Why was it so freaking hard
to come across these videos? Now, in hindsight, this answer
makes quite a lot of sense. Many online communities would
not want to host explicit and violent content of this nature, especially since online bandwidth was quite limited at the time for a digital medium such as video. If they could use video, might as well use it for more
suitable, friendlier content. Because of these factors, there really weren't a ton of videos you could find on the internet, especially in comparison
to what we have today. So what was there to do? Well, the answer to that question would allegedly be found at a dinner party at Chen's San Francisco apartment in which Karim and Hurley also attended. I say allegedly because Karim said that no such
dinner party ever occurred. In fact, none of the three founders could ever fully agree on
what actually happened. But anyway, according to legend, at this dinner party, the three guys just started showing each
other videos of their cats and thought to themselves, "Hey, these videos are pretty cool. How could we easily share
this with all of our friends? I mean, do we really have
to burn like 100 DVDs? The file is too big to
attach to an email." This reminded them of their struggles to find those videos of Janet
Jackson and the tsunami, and that was when they had a revelation. What if we created a website where people didn't have to
search all around the internet for a specific video? Instead, they could just
find everything in one place. The boys got to work on
their new business venture, and a website called youtube.com was born. Now, this is the story
that the media often tells about how YouTube started, and while it certainly is true, it gets a lot more complicated
and deeper than that. YouTube was by no means
some superficial idea created on Taco Night. It was a rough, rigorous process filled with ingenious
design, critical thinking, competition against both other companies and a technologically limited
but growing online industry, legal battles, maybe
even a little betrayal. Surely something that can't
be covered in just one video. Absolutely not, and don't call me Shirley. Which is why I would like to
welcome you to a new series. This is YouTube History. (logo chimes) Firstly, YouTube was not the
first video-sharing site. Not even close. Sites like ShareYourWorld,
Metacafe, PandoraTV, StupidVideos, and even
Vimeo all predate YouTube. So what was so special about YouTube? Well, all these sites
had the same problem, and this problem was the reason it was still so hard to find
videos online at the time, technological limitation. Now, this was due to many factors such as bandwidth, upload
quotas, and compatibility issues. In the early 2000s, the internet
really wasn't that strong. This was a time where people still thought 50 kilobytes
per second was fast and where many were even
still using dial-up. The idea of a website that
hosted all kinds of videos was just too ambitious and therefore very selective as to what kind of content
could be added on there. And even if you did
have the computing power and internet speed to upload such a video, the files could only be a certain size, you could only upload a
certain amount of videos, and, most importantly, it had
to be the right kind of video. Oh, your video is an AVI file? Well, we only take MPEG. Too bad, so sad. Running a website costs
money and resources, especially hosting big files like video. Not to mention that the
operating systems of the time were not spectacular with
video streaming performance. So yes, video-sharing sites did exist, but they were just very
complicated and annoying, and that was why it was still
so hard to come across videos. And these were all issues that were more or less
addressed at this dinner party. The three were already working
on a video-oriented website, just under a different vision. "Tune in, hook up." That's right. YouTube
was a dating website. This would explain the dropdown menu featured on the first design for the site, but there is some discrepancy as to whether this was the slogan or even the original name of the website. But regardless, it took great inspiration from an already popular
dating site called Hot or Not, where users could upload
photos of themselves and you would rate, MySpace
style, how hot they were. It was basically this but with video. You couldn't search these videos, they would show up at random, and it was just people briefly
talking about themselves. The idea didn't catch on
because it was just Hot or Not except it required more
work and computing power. Didn't really make sense. The founders got so desperate, they even tried paying
camgirls on Craigslist $20 to put their own videos on the platform just to get the ball rolling. But even with these undesirable results, there was one unknowingly
genius thing about the site. This was user-generated content being uploaded to the site in video form. Perhaps this is where
the Janet Jackson video could find its new home. The three boys realized what
kind of advantage they had, and the domain name youtube.com was registered on Valentine's Day of 2005. They were so excited about the idea, they were willing to put
their jobs on the line. They certainly wouldn't be
the first ones to do this. In fact, a term was coined
for a whole group of people who left PayPal to start their
own successful businesses called the PayPal Mafia. The founders' roles in
putting together the website reflected their positions at PayPal. Hurley would focus on the
design aspects of the site, such as how the website would look, and even create the company's logo, and Karim and Chen focused on the code and getting the thing to
actually work properly. The technical details of how the site was coded and put together will be its own separate video. But it was created just
after a couple of months. And then on April 25th, 2005, the website officially entered public beta when Karim uploaded the very
first-ever video to the site called Me at the zoo, which he filmed at the San Diego Zoo. And instead of advertising
it as a dating site, they would focus on a new angle which would be integral
to the site's success. It's Flickr for video. This would be the phrase thrown around in everyday conversation when people were being
introduced to YouTube. On Flickr, you could
upload any images you want, and the site would host
them for any anyone to see. Now that YouTube had this
exact approach but with video, it didn't limit what
users could post there. There was something very
special about YouTube that allowed it to blow its
predecessors out of the water. It took advantage of a very fast-growing and popular technology
called Adobe Flash Player. As long as you had this
installed on your computer, not only could you view the video online without having to download it, you could upload whatever videos
you wanted to the platform. The file type did not matter. This was a huge deal at the time because now you could upload
videos to the internet, well, without being a computer whiz. Flyers were put up around
Stanford University. In fact, some of the
earliest videos on YouTube would be from Stanford students. And even word of mouth got people to know about this new website. And before they knew it, YouTube now had their own headquarters, an office above a pizzeria
in San Mateo, California. And the website grew
rapidly. It snowballed. Its recognition would even
branch out into the real world, even being featured on the news. During a segment on the
show "Call for Help," co-hosts Leo Laporte and Amber MacArthur pose a very interesting question. - A lot of people don't
wanna download video. A lot of people wanna go to the website and actually view the
video in a player, so- - [Leo] How much? - Free. - [Leo] What? - Yeah, it's completely free. - [Leo] It's free? - Yeah, it's completely free. - How? Who's paying for the bandwidth? That's amazing.
- Not us. (laughs) - [Leo] Yeah. - That's a great point. Who is paying for it? How on Earth were three guys hosting thousands and thousands of clips with pretty much no problems and for free? Well, according to Hurley, YouTube at the time was using a hosting
service called ServerBeach, and they apparently had some special deal where they were giving
websites unlimited bandwidth at an affordable price, and so they greatly
took advantage of this. But of course not even
unlimited is unlimited, and as the site got bigger, they would need to find a more
reliable approach eventually. These three did something
quite brilliant to combat this, and although the practice
wasn't uncommon at the time, it was the method that stood out, the use of venture capitalists. Keep in mind, these three were living
comfortably from PayPal, so at the very beginning, being able to fund the storage cost for a site like YouTube out of pocket really isn't that unusual. But as YouTube began to grow rapidly, way beyond what they expected within just the first six months or so, bandwidth demand would
grow to sky-high rates. So the only way to get more
money is to ask for it. But rather than asking
customers to pay for it through premium subscriptions, they sought out private equity funding from Sequoia Capital in November of 2005, roughly $3 1/2 million, which was just enough to keep them afloat until another company
would enter the picture. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. So it was the vision, the website's genius use of Adobe Flash, the funding from venture capitalists, and the fact that it was free that made YouTube destroy the
other competition of the time. But there was one other thing,
arguably the most important, that's pretty much overlooked, timing. While I am not the
biggest believer in luck, I do believe in perfect
storms of circumstances where the outcome can
become something favorable based on how the subject behaves. In Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers," he makes a very interesting point regarding the success of
big tech billionaires. What do Steve Jobs, Bill
Gates, Eric Schmidt, and Andy Bechtolsheim all have in common? They were all born in 1955 just a couple months
apart from each other. This might seem like a mundane point, but consider the fact that all of them would've been 20 years old by 1975, meaning they would all be
young, healthy, ambitious adults with their whole lives ahead of them that are finally on their own just as the personal
computer era is starting. Gladwell argues that if
Steve Jobs had been born just a year later, he likely wouldn't have founded Apple. Of course, this is all
just educated guessing, and Gladwell goes a lot deeper than that. But the point is that the
factors of your environment and even the era you are living in determine your success in some ways. Let's use the British Invasion
of the 1960s as an example. The Beatles' Ed Sullivan performance happened at exactly the right time. If you want the details for why, I made a video all about it,
which you can find up here. Click, click here. The point is that happened, then a million other British
acts exactly like them followed and also became insanely
popular in America. If The Beatles had shown
up just a year earlier or even later, the outcome could have
been very different. We even saw this with ChatGPT. As soon as ChatGPT came out, there was an explosion
of AI-related software. The year 2005 was
arguably the perfect time to start a video-sharing website. It was the creek that divided the Internet's
archaic '90s infrastructure and the new, innovative social media age that we've come to recognize today, and YouTube was the bridge. Some things are just meant to
happen all at the same time, and the one who is the most brilliant at convincing people that
they are the best prevails. And because of YouTube's
incredible features and methods of getting
funding and being free, it rose to the top drastically. Just a month later,
Dailymotion would come out, and a bunch of other
similar sites would follow, but YouTube had that
headstart at being brilliant. And with video streaming-friendly
operating systems such as Windows XP holding
majority market share in 2005 and with smartphones becoming
mainstream very shortly after, the demand for online video became less complicated
and more realistic, so running a website like YouTube just wasn't so hard anymore. These things were the catalyst
that created the boom. Despite YouTube having a
way bigger market share and being much more popular, all of these video-sharing sites were used for roughly the same thing, as digital video repositories. Instead of keeping everything on tape or on DVDs that sit on your shelf, you could access them
online whenever you please and even share them with your
friends with just a link. Minimal effort and no
downloading necessary. But just like most things in
life, the easier they get, the more time it gives
people to be creative. So people really started to notice that. They start uploading comedy skits, fictional storytelling, entertainment. Maybe there was a way
to make money from this. It was during this time early adopters started
working on videos together, creating the world's first-ever online collaborative video community. Collaborations? Something I'd never do. I'm not a sellout. I'm not some cheap guy who
would let any random person take over my channel
for like three minutes. Never, ever. - YouTube may have been born
as a simple video repository, but something magical happened as the winds of change
swept through the internet. As YouTube and its user base grew, people realized it was not
just a place to upload videos but to connect, share stories,
and build communities. This is where the concept of
influencers comes into play. These were individuals
who, through their content, had the power to shape
opinions, trends, and cultures. They were the new-age
celebrities but with a twist. They were accessible,
relatable, and interactive. YouTube became their stage, and the world was their audience. The platform evolved
into a social media giant where content creators and
viewers could engage in ways that were never possible
through traditional media. One of the earliest and most
iconic examples of influencers was Ian Hecox and Anthony Padilla, the dynamic duo known as Smosh. They were just ordinary
high school friends with a shared sense of humor, but they had a knack for creating content that resonated with a generation looking for something fresh and relatable. Their early videos were simple, often just them lip syncing
to popular theme songs, but it was their energy, their
chemistry, and their humor that made them stand out. Smosh became a phenomenon. They were not just making videos. They were shaping a
culture and a generation. They showed what was possible
on this brand-new platform. They were innovators and
they were trailblazers. But here's the core of
what made Smosh and YouTube such a perfect match, community. YouTube allowed Smosh
to build a community, and in return, Smosh helped
build YouTube's community. They grew together. As YouTube continued to grow, it became evident that it
was a platform for all ages. Peter Oakley, known as geriatric1927, was a testament to this. Unlike the energetic energy of Smosh, Peter's content was a
gentle stream of wisdom. He shared stories from his life, his thoughts on various topics,
and even some tutorials. YouTube provided him with
a sense of community, and he, in turn, provided
solace and comfort to those who watched his videos. And the community embraced him. They found comfort and ease in his words. They found a friend. Peter's presence on YouTube
also broke stereotypes. He showed that in 2005, social media was far more
than just for the young. He demonstrated that age is just a number, and wisdom and connection are timeless. Another early YouTube
trailblazer was Lisa Donovan, also known as LisaNova. She entertained and broke barriers for female content creators. But what set LisaNova apart? Well, I'd have to say it was
her fearless approach to comedy and her ability to create
diverse characters. She was bold, she was funny, and she was unapologetically herself. Before the birth of YouTube, the comedy scene,
especially sketch comedy, was heavily male-dominated. Opportunities for female comedians
were few and far between. YouTube changed the game. It gave creators like LisaNova a platform where they didn't have to wait for someone to give them a chance. They could take the chance on themselves. LisaNova seized this opportunity. Her channel grew rapidly, and she became one of the
first female content creators to gain significant popularity on YouTube. Of course, these are just a
few of the content creators that shaped the YouTube scene
during its earliest days. There are countless others. And as YouTube grew, so did the amount of its
influencers and content creators. From a simple video repository
to a social media giant, YouTube became a platform for connection, entertainment, innovation,
and community building. - And just like that,
Hollywood was now online, and it all happened before
YouTube even left beta, as it would officially go
public as a corporation on December 15th, 2005. And YouTube recognized this very much. If this was the direction
the site was going in, then it had to take on more personality than being just a video repository, and this would be
reflected in design changes such as changing the
YouTube profile layout. They were no longer
profiles. They were channels. Ditching the ugly online archive look and adopting the highly
customizable CSS channel layout, very akin to MySpace pages. You could even add filmmaker roles to it, your entire personality on one page. And other outside forces were really starting to see the potential of this new website, and so a new company
would enter the picture, a sort of acquisition,
as you would call it. But I'm afraid we're gonna
have to stop there for now. But the fact remains, right now, I can put food on the table quite literally because
of Janet Jackson's boobs. There are some things that
shouldn't be said out loud. So that was YouTube History. I really hope you all liked it. My friend Zack is going to
help me with a ton of these. Please go check out his channel, especially if you are into
YouTube culture-related content. His videos are fantastic. I know I don't really talk to you, I'm usually talking at you, but I'm really excited about this series. The plan is to do this weekly. We'll see where that goes. I'm really working on it. I'm gonna do the best I can to
upload these chronologically, so from like 2005 onwards. I may not always do that, though, in case I, like, forget a
story and wanna go back, but I will do the best I can to make the playlist chronological. So if you really wanna watch, like, the ultimate YouTube
History experience, watch it in order from the playlist that I have on the channel. You'll find it on the channel somewhere. But just stay tuned. Some of the stories I'll
be covering for this series are just insane, some of them even anecdotal, like that time I may or may not have almost taken YouTube
down accidentally, like, over a decade ago. We'll get there, we'll get there, but we've still got a ways to go. Anyway, I'm really looking
forward to where this series goes and I will see you all soon. Thank you so much for watching. If you enjoyed this video, please subscribe and click
the notification bell so that you never miss a future video.
