YouTube history

YouTube is a video-sharing website where users may upload and share videos.

This website was created on February 14, 2005, by three former workers of the American e-commerce giant PayPal, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, who registered the domain name.

Their hypothesis was that regular people would find it entertaining to share their “home films.” The company’s headquarters are in the California city of San Bruno.

It was only a few months after the site’s restricted (or “beta”) launch that it began seeing more than 30,000 unique visitors per day.

Before it was officially released on December 15, 2005, YouTube was offering more than two million video views each day before it was formally launched.

That figure has risen to more than 25 million views by the beginning of January 2006. In March 2006, the number of videos accessible on the site topped 25 million, with more than 20,000 new movies being posted on a daily basis, according to the company.

YouTube was providing more than 100 million videos per day by the summer of 2006, and the amount of videos being posted to the site showed no signs of slowing down.

The massive increase in traffic to YouTube has resulted in a slew of issues of its own. A constant stream of new computer equipment and high-speed Internet connections was required by the organization.

In addition, since numerous media businesses realized that some of the films posted to YouTube included copyrighted content, YouTube was compelled to commit greater financial resources to prospective lawsuits.

YouTube started seeking for a buyer after seeing little success in monetizing its Web site or controlling its rising operating expenses.

In 2005, the American search engine corporation Google Inc. established a video service called Google Video, but the service failed to attract much interest, prompting Google to acquire YouTube for $1.65 billion in shares in November 2006.

Google, on the other hand, chose to keep YouTube running as it had been rather than integrating the two websites. The company has negotiated agreements with a number of entertainment companies that would allow copyrighted video material to appear on YouTube and would grant You Tube users the right to include certain copyrighted songs in their videos, in an effort to reduce the risk of copyright-infringement lawsuits.

Also accepted to be removed from YouTube were tens of thousands of video clips that were protected by intellectual property rights (IP rights). According to a press release from Google, “in November 2008, the company negotiated an arrangement with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Inc. (MGM) to broadcast some of the studio’s full-length movies and television series, with access to the broadcasts being free and adverts running alongside the programs.“