How Was YouTube Founded?
On 14 October 1888, in the garden of a house called Oakwood Grange in Roundhay, Leeds, four people walked a few steps. An elderly woman, Sarah Whitley, turned round walking backwards; her husband Joseph's coat-tails flew up as he turned. That was all. About two seconds.
The man behind the camera was the French inventor Louis Le Prince. The people in the garden were his son Adolphe, his mother-in-law, his father-in-law and a family friend. Today Guinness World Records recognises this brief footage as the oldest surviving film.
The rest of the story is dark. Sarah Whitley died ten days after the filming. On 16 September 1890, as he prepared to present his invention in America, Le Prince boarded a train from Dijon to Paris and was never seen again. Neither he nor his luggage was ever found. In the years that followed, other names, above all Thomas Edison, were credited as the inventors of the moving image.
The oldest surviving film in history showed not a battle or a king, but people walking in a family garden. 117 years later, something similar happened again.
Nineteen seconds in front of an elephant
On 23 April 2005 a young software engineer, Jawed Karim, stood in front of the elephants at San Diego Zoo. His school friend Yakov Lapitsky held the camera. Karim remarked that elephants have really, really, really long trunks, and added: "And that's pretty much all there is to say."
The video, called "Me at the zoo", was the first ever uploaded to YouTube. It was as ordinary as Le Prince's garden. And, like that garden, it became the place where an era began.
How was YouTube founded?
YouTube was founded in 2005 by three former PayPal employees: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. Hurley was a designer who had studied fine art at Indiana University of Pennsylvania; he had designed PayPal's first logo. Chen and Karim had studied computer science at the University of Illinois.
The founding story is told in two different versions. According to Hurley and Chen, the idea came about when they struggled to share videos shot at a dinner party at Chen's flat in San Francisco. Karim says the dinner party never happened; for him, the inspiration was not being able to find footage online of the 2004 Super Bowl half-time scandal and the Indian Ocean tsunami. Years later Chen admitted that the dinner party story may have been played up by the marketing side, out of a wish to create an easily digestible story.
The first idea was a video dating site
The really surprising part is the starting point. The founders first conceived YouTube as a video dating site. According to Karim, they even had a slogan: "Tune in, hook up." They posted ads on Craigslist offering women 20 dollars to upload a video introducing themselves. Nobody came. As Chen told SXSW in 2016, they eventually said: "OK, forget the dating part, let's open the site up to any kind of video."
The first twenty months, by date
- 14 February 2005: the domain name youtube.com was activated.
- 23 April 2005: the first video, "Me at the zoo", was uploaded.
- November 2005: Sequoia Capital invested 3.5 million dollars; a further 8 million dollars followed in April 2006.
- December 2005: the site came out of beta. Its slogan became "Broadcast Yourself".
- February 2006: user-uploaded copies of Saturday Night Live's "Lazy Sunday" sketch had been viewed more than five million times in total; NBC asked for them to be taken down on copyright grounds.
- July 2006: the site reached 100 million video views and more than 65,000 new uploads a day.
- 9 October 2006: Google announced it would buy YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars; the deal was completed on 13 November 2006.
Three lessons for a founder
Take your own friction seriously
Whichever founding story you believe, the common thread is the same: someone wanted to share or find a video and couldn't. The best ideas often grow out of an everyday annoyance. A small obstacle that bothers you every week may well be bothering other people too.
If users don't come, change the idea
Not a single video arrived for the dating site. Instead of digging in, the founders opened the door wider. What mattered was staying loyal to the problem rather than the idea: sharing video was hard, and that problem was far bigger than dating.
Open the door and you carry the risk
What made YouTube grow was leaving the content to its users. The same decision also brought copyright problems, as the "Lazy Sunday" episode showed. Building an open platform means partly letting go of control. You have to build it knowing that. If you want to grow on YouTube today, you'll find practical tips in how to increase your YouTube views.
From the field to the screen: "broadcast"
YouTube's first slogan was "Broadcast Yourself". The story of the word "broadcast" begins in the fields. In 1767 it described scattering seed by hand over a wide area. The figurative sense of "spreading widely" appeared in the 1780s. Radio only claimed the word in the early 1920s.
The second half of the name tips its hat to an old technology as well. From the late 1950s, "the tube" was an American nickname for television, after the cathode ray tube inside the set. In YouTube's first logo, the word "Tube" sat inside a frame that resembled an old television screen.
The name was a promise: television is yours now, and the hand scattering the seed is yours too.
Final word
In 1964 the Canadian thinker Marshall McLuhan gave the first chapter of his book "Understanding Media" this title:
"The medium is the message."
What changed between Le Prince's garden and Karim's elephants was not what the images showed; it was who could film them and who they could reach. Today that medium sits in your pocket. What will you decide to share with it, and with whom?
