.tv 21 months & $1.65 billion

[heroes]

YouTube.com was registered February 15, 2005 by PayPal employees Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim who saw an opening in the market for a website where users could upload and share videos.

The first video was posted on April 23, 2005, and in May an official public beta was launched, attracting an average of 30,000 viewers per day.

In November, YouTube received $3.5 million in funding from Sequoia Capital. At this point, YouTube had over 200,000 registered users and was showing over 2 million videos per day. After building up a strong reputation and user-base in its beta stage with a staff of 20, YouTube.com made its official debut on December 15, 2005.

By January, 2006, users were watching 25 million videos per day. In March, the total number of clips available on YouTube also reached 25 million, with users uploading 20,000 new videos a day.

By April, with bandwidth costs approaching $1 million per month, YouTube gained an aditional $8 million in funding from Sequoia Capital.

In May, YouTube’s viewership surpassed that of CNN.com, and it was responsible for 43% of all videos viewed on the Internet.

On July 16, YouTube announced that users were currently viewing 100 million videos per day and uploading 65,000 per day (2,700 every hour). The staff remained at just over 30 members.

On October 9, 2006, it was announced that YouTube was being purchased by Google for 1.65 Billion in stock. At the time, it was the biggest purchase Google had ever made. The deal was finalized on November 13, 2006.

That same month, YouTube was named Time Magazine’s Invention of the Year for 2006.

It its final issue of the year, Time magazine named "YOU" the person of the year, in recognition of the importance of the user-generated content, driving sites such as YouTube.

 

[freedom30]

Thanks for that nice article re the value of the visual aspect of the internet. Well appreciated. Rep added.

 

[nicholas]

They were at the right place at the right time. Timing is a large part of what it is, as well as being among the first to have a true and really easy way to upload and play videos, something that was hard with other sites at the time.

The "buzz" helped them as well since Chad Hurley's girlfriend's father at the time (now his father-in-law) was the awesomely well-connected-in-the-VC-community Jim Clark (you may recall him as a co-founder of Netscape, Silicon Graphics and a bunch of other companies), and this helped bring in the contacts who gave the company the star appeal to go with its rapidly successful operation.