YouTube has been at the top of the list as one of the most influential social media platforms for quite some time. Last year alone, the site had over 30 million users. For better or worse, YouTube has given people a space to create and share their content. This couldn’t have been possible without Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, who all once worked at PayPal. Soon enough, the idea of sharing home videos was in full effect.
A little over 16 years ago, the first-ever YouTube video was posted, entitled Me at the zoo, on April 23, 2005. At the time this article was written, it had 168,440,960 views and 7.9 million likes. After this video was posted, the website’s popularity exploded, and by May 2005, it had over 30,000 visitors a day. When it officially launched, the site had over two million more views.
However, due to this influx of people, the company had to buy more equipment and had to set aside large amounts of money towards litigations as many videos contained copyright materials. Because of this, the company had to search for a buyer; Google would soon take over and remove the tens of thousands of copyright videos. In November of 2008, the company agreed to broadcast some of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc.’s (MGM) movies with ads. Surely, based on the number of users, the world wouldn’t be quite the same without Youtube.
— Maya Ross
Sources
https://www.britannica.com/topic/YouTube
https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/23/tech/youtube-first-video-jawed-karim-trnd/index.html
