Founded in February 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, all three having worked for PayPal at the time. Venture firm Sequoia Capital invested $11.5 million in 2005, helping fund the startup, who’s early headquarters was above a pizzeria in California. The domain name was registered in Feburary of 2005, and development was done over the next few months. After a public beta test in May, it was officially launched in November. The first video uploaded was by Jawed Karim entitled “Me At the Zoo” on April 23rd, 2005 and is still on the site.
By July 2006, 65,000 videos a day were being uploaded with over 100 million video views.It is estimated the site consumed as much bandwidth as the internet in 2000. By 2008, bandwidth costs were a staggering one million per day.
Within a year of it’s launch in October 2006, Google purchased the site for 1.65 billion in Google stock. Although criticized for failing to protect copyrighted material, YouTube is now the dominant provider of online video in the United States, with a market share of around 43 percent and more than six billion videos viewed in January 2009.
