SAN FRANCISCO: YouTube has evolved from a dinner party lark 20 years ago into a modern lifestyle staple poised to overtake US cable television in paid viewership.
PayPal colleagues Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim conceived YouTube in 2005, reportedly during a dinner party. The domain YouTube.com launched on Valentine’s Day that year. Video uploading capabilities were added on April 23, when Karim posted the first video, titled “Me at the Zoo.”
The 19-second clip showing Karim at the San Diego Zoo’s elephant exhibit has garnered 348 million views. Over the next 20 years, the site has expanded beyond what was imagined possible back in 2005.
“YouTube was started by tech bros who wanted a video hosting service to watch reruns of Janet Jackson’s ‘wardrobe malfunction’ during the Super Bowl,” said eMarketer analyst Ross Benes. “Now, it’s the world’s largest digital video service in terms of time spent and ad revenue — it’s an utter behemoth.”
YouTube reached more than 2.5 billion viewers globally last year, with its music and premium tier subscribers hitting 100 million, according to market tracker Statista. Users worldwide watch more than a billion hours of YouTube content daily on television sets alone, Google reported.
“If you go back 20 years, it would have seemed laughable that this website with kids making parody videos would become a threat to Disney, ABC, and CBS,” Benes said. “That’s what they were able to accomplish.”
YouTube’s breakthrough came from challenging traditional television titans without requiring studios or production costs — it was users who were creating and uploading the content. The platform hosts everything from concert clips to political campaign ads to how-to videos — and much more.
“The amount of new stuff coming out is a firehose that you can’t turn off, so people are always tuning in,” Benes said.
According to Google, more than 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. Analysts consider Google’s 2006 purchase of YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock a pivotal moment, combining Google’s search and advertising expertise with a video-sharing platform that had passionate users.
“YouTube was part of the recovery from the dot-com collapse, when people realised monetisation was actually important,” said tech analyst Rob Enderle. “YouTube became an example of how dot-coms should have been done, as opposed to how they were done in the late 1990s.”
Google used its advertising know-how to build a successful model, sharing revenue with creators who attract significant audiences.
Published in Dawn, February 12th, 2025
