When Did YouTube ...? A Fascinating History

Did you know YouTube first started as a video dating site by three bored guys on Valentine's Day? And no, we're not kidding. The tagline was even going to be “Tune In, Hook Up”!

Although February 14th, 2005 is often the date that many people attribute as the start of YouTube, it was just the day that the youtube.com domain name was registered. The site didn't actually go live until a couple months later.

On April 23, 2005, youtube.com went live for the very first time on a single web server — rented for a mere $100 per month!

To say the video dating site idea wasn't a hit would be generous. They couldn't get a single person to upload a dating video. They even posted on Craigslist offering $20, and still couldn't get anyone to upload one.

With their initial idea clearly not working, the three co-founders had to figure out what to do with the video uploading platform they had built.

Fortunately, as YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim put it, “It didn't even matter. Our users were one step ahead of us. They began using YouTube to share videos of all kinds. Videos of their dogs, vacations, anything. We said, 'Why don't we let our users define what YouTube is all about'.” The rest is history.

YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim uploaded a few short clips of airplanes taking off as the platform's very first videos — just to fill the site with something. But unfortunately none of those videos remain today.

The first video that's still around today is a 19-second video called “Me at the zoo” that shows Jawed at the San Diego casually pointing out that the elephants have “really, really, really long trunks.” It had an off-the-cuff, one-take, no-edits style that helped set the “anyone can do this” tone that defined early YouTube culture. Some media historians even go as far as to assert that it was the world's first vlog.

The first video to be uploaded by someone other than a co-founder was a video titled “My Snowboarding Skillz,” uploaded the same day, earning the user “mw” with the honor of uploading the first “fail” video on YouTube ever.

Fun fact: After YouTube was sold to Google, Jawed found himself with little ability to directly influence YouTube's decisions. However, he occasionally leverages the description of his historical “first video” to protest decisions he disapproves of, most famously YouTube's removal of dislikes.

In October 2005, YouTube was only a few months old. The community was buzzing with activity, and the user base was increasing rapidly — but there had yet to be a true breakout moment.

As Nike's then Director of Global Digital Media put it:

“It's important to remember that YouTube didn't have the reach and the presence it has today, it was just starting, and therefore we found it an important channel to try out.”

The Nike marketing team came up with a simple idea with viral potential: upload an unpolished clip titled Touch of Gold, where soccer star Ronaldinho laces up in gold shoes, casually juggles a soccer ball, then hits the crossbar four times in a row — all without ever letting the ball touch the ground.

The video was initially uploaded to a Nike-branded account, but the marketing team quickly realized it would work even better if it looked more like a fan upload. That version of the video caught fire immediately, with the seemingly impossible trick sparking a cascade of debate, rewatches, shares, and “crossbar challenges” on schoolyards nationwide.

Within a month, it had earned its spot in history as the first YouTube video ever to cross one million views.

More importantly, that first viral video put YouTube itself on the map. The very same month, the site landed in Nielsen's monthly Internet ratings for the first time, and Sequoia Capital invested $3.5 million into the fledgling company.

The age of the viral video had officially begun.

On July 16, 2006, Reuters announced that viewers were now watching 100 million YouTube videos every day. With over 20 million people using it each month, YouTube had officially become popular.

The growth was a sight to behold, but unfortunately so was the bill. Forbes estimated at the time that surging traffic was costing the little company nearly $1 million in bandwidth every month.

With only $11 million in capital raised so far, there were rumors that the company would burn through its cash by Thanksgiving if it didn't find a deeper set of pockets — and fast.

In early 2005, Google launched a video platform of its own called Google Video — but it never quite worked. Uploading was clunky, the player wasn't reliable, and users just didn't stick around. Inside Google, one exec in particular took notice of where those users were going instead: Susan Wojcicki. After watching her kids endlessly replay silly clips on a scrappy little site called YouTube, she pushed hard for Google to buy it.

The $1.65 billion purchase of a company that was only 19 months old, and yet was already drowning in copyright threats, was widely criticized. Billionaire Mark Cuban famously scoffed, “Only a moron would buy YouTube — it'll be sued into oblivion.” But history has had the last word: that so-called “moronic” acquisition has gone on to generate an estimated 300x return, and Susan would later take the reins of YouTube herself.

The terms were worked out over a plate of mozzarella sticks at a Denny's, and the final documents were signed on the hood of a car in the parking lot. The YouTube founders, Chad and Steve, announced the deal in a classically low-key YouTube video — while absolutely beaming ear-to-ear.

Almost immediately after the deal was announced, YouTube revealed revenue-sharing agreements with CBS, Universal Music, Sony BMG, and Warner Music.

Just like that, YouTube's financial and legal troubles vanished overnight. It had come within inches of death, and turned it into one of the best outcomes in internet history.

YouTube had started giving big media companies a cut of the ad revenue their content generated, so many people naturally wondered, When would they start paying creators? Shouldn't YouTube be giving them money too?

Almost immediately after the purchase, Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced on an earnings call that the company wanted to “figure out how to share advertising revenue with every content owner on YouTube.” Susan Wojcicki, the primary advocate of the acquisition, was tasked with that job.

Her team started by integrating Google's AdSense tech into YouTube watch pages, and soon after began testing in-video overlay ads to see how monetization could work at scale. Those early experiments were promising enough that on May 3, 2007, YouTube quietly launched a pilot of the Partner Program, inviting a small group of popular creators to earn ad revenue directly from their videos. Monetization had finally started on YouTube.

Fortunately for Google and those lucky early YouTube creators, it didn't take long to prove the model. Within two weeks, those pilot videos had served up a whopping 20 million ad impressions!

That launch is now widely recognized as the start of the modern creator economy.

In its early days, YouTube didn't have any native advertising — just the same old AdSense banners that every other website used to monetize traffic back then.

Following the launch of the Partner Program, YouTube began quietly testing new in-video ad formats with the program's first 200 creators, with the goal of finding a way to monetize viewership without ruining the user experience.

Those early tests showed that users had a strong aversion to more intrusive forms like pre-roll ads, so YouTube opted to start slow with overlay ads. As YouTube Product Manager Shashi Seth put it at the time:

“Users hate pre-roll; overlays let them keep watching.”

On August 21, 2007, YouTube officially gets ads — introducing its first native ad format, called InVideo ads. These semi-transparent overlay ads only showed on the bottom 20% of videos, didn't prevent them from playing, and disappeared on their own after a few seconds if ignored.

Despite this cautious approach, the click-through rates of the new ad unit were nearly 5x higher than traditional display ads, making it an immediate hit with advertisers. And for Google, which just paid $1.65B for the company, putting ads on videos was a crucial first step toward turning YouTube into a real business.

On April 8, 2011, YouTube officially added live streaming, launching its long-anticipated live streaming platform after months of quiet experimentation.

Within a week of launch, Coachella became the first major event to stream live on the platform. A couple weeks after that, a jaw-dropping 72 million viewers tuned in to watch the royal wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton.

These early successes in live streaming opened the door to hosting lucrative content like sports, concerts, news, and gaming — positioning YouTube to compete with Twitch and live TV alike. And with over 1 billion hours of live content per month, it's safe to say the strategy worked!

YouTube TV was announced on February 28, 2017, offering live TV without the cable box or long-term contract. For $35 a month, users got 40+ channels, six household accounts, and unlimited cloud DVR — providing a streamlined alternative to bloated cable bundles.

On April 5, the service went live in five major metros: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia, and the Bay Area. Even with the launch limited to just those five cities, the mobile app passed a million downloads within weeks.

By 2024, YouTube TV had grown to more than eight million subscribers, boosted by pandemic-era cord-cutting and a big audience push from its exclusive NFL Sunday Ticket deal.

Exactly 10 years & 7 months after YouTube first got its start, the company introduced YouTube Shorts.

Although the platform eventually went global, Shorts initially launched in India — just weeks after TikTok was banned there. The newly-released Shorts platform aimed squarely at creators suddenly left without a platform, offering 15-second vertical videos, music clips, and basic editing tools.

The strategy worked. Within six months, the Shorts player was already pulling in 3.5 billion views a day from India alone. By the time the U.S. beta opened in March, that number leapt to 6.5 billion — with YouTube announcing a $100 million fund to pay creators soon after.

But those numbers were child's play compared to what was to come. By 2023, Shorts was pulling in an eye-watering 50 billion daily views and had become one of the fastest-growing parts of the platform.

As YouTube continued to grow, so did its problems. Before 2021, it wasn't uncommon for specific YouTube videos to be targeted by coordinated dislike mobs.

Some notable examples: a misogynistic backlash to the trailer for the all-female Ghostbusters reboot, as well as the YouTube Rewind 2018 video — which earned the dubious distinction of most-disliked video ever after many users felt the video wasn't representative of the real YouTube community.

In early 2021, YouTube experimented with hiding public dislike counts, and found that it significantly cut targeted dislike brigading. On November 10, YouTube officially removed dislikes across the platform. The dislike button stayed, but only creators could see the count through YouTube Studio.

While some small creators welcomed the move, it was broadly unpopular across both the user & creator communities. Top creators like Marques Brownlee spoke out against it, and even YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim protested by updating the description of the very first video on YouTube to say:

“When every YouTuber agrees that removing dislikes is a stupid idea, it probably is. Try again, YouTube.”