YouTube Founded

The video is nineteen seconds long. Jawed Karim stands in front of the elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo and remarks on their trunks. It was uploaded to the channel "jawed" on 23 April 2005 under the title "Me at the zoo", and it is still online.

By the time it went up, the company behind it was about two months old.

Three Engineers From PayPal

YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, all of whom had worked at PayPal. Hurley had a design background; Chen and Karim were computer-science graduates. When Sequoia Capital invested later that year, YouTube's own press release introduced the company as "founded by Internet commerce pioneers from PayPal"—and the Sequoia partner quoted in it, Roelof Botha, was PayPal's former CFO.

The founding date usually given, 14 February 2005, is the day the youtube.com domain was registered. The .com registry records the registration at 05:13 UTC on 15 February, which was the evening of the 14th in California.

Why they built it is less settled than when. Wikipedia's account collects at least three origin stories: Hurley and Chen's version, in which the idea came from trouble sharing videos of a dinner party; Karim's version, which credits the difficulty of finding clips of the 2004 Super Bowl halftime controversy and of the Indian Ocean tsunami online; and an early concept modelled on video dating. None of them can be confirmed from a contemporaneous document, and this page does not choose between them.

The Technical Bet: Flash Video in Every Browser

Online video in 2005 was a thicket of competing players and formats. YouTube's launch press release named the problem directly: before YouTube, "the burden was on the user to figure out how to make videos available on the Web and to support multiple media players and hundreds of multimedia formats."

YouTube's answer was to take whatever the user uploaded and convert it on the server into Flash Video, which played inside the Flash browser plugin. The same release noted that this made videos viewable "through every major Web browser, including Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox", and claimed that Flash was available to 97 percent of Internet users. That figure is YouTube's own, not an independent measurement, but the logic is clear: the plugin was already installed, so the viewer installed nothing.

Flash at the time belonged to Macromedia. Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia was finalised on 3 December 2005 and announced as complete two days later—in the same month YouTube came out of its preview.

From Preview to Launch

The company's own press releases, preserved by the Internet Archive, give the early timeline:

The Blockbuster comparison was Chad Hurley's, and he used it twice. In November he said YouTube was moving the equivalent of one Blockbuster store a day; at the December launch it was "two Blockbuster stores every day over the Internet, and that's only a start." The figures are company claims, but they are the claims the company was making about itself at the time, and they show traffic roughly doubling between the funding and the launch.

The launch release also described features that were not yet standard: tags that let users label and browse videos, playlists, favourites, and—as the November funding release had already put it—sharing "across the Internet on other sites, blogs and through e-mail" as well as on youtube.com.

Google, October 2006

Less than ten months after the official launch, on 9 October 2006, Google announced that it would acquire YouTube for US$1.65 billion in a stock-for-stock transaction. The announcement put YouTube's traffic at more than 100 million video views and 65,000 new uploads a day. YouTube, then based in San Bruno, California, was to keep its own brand and operate independently, and all of its employees would stay.

The deal closed on 13 November 2006. Google's filing with the SEC reports that it issued 3,217,560 shares of Class A common stock, plus restricted stock units, options and a warrant convertible into another 442,210 shares, and that 12.5 percent of the equity was held in escrow for a year. The price was set by Google's average share price over the 30 trading days to 9 November; TechCrunch calculated that at Google's closing price that day, the shares were worth about $1.775 billion.

Why "Me at the zoo" Matters

The first video is often treated as a curiosity, but it captures what was new. It was not produced by a broadcaster or a studio; it was shot by one of the founders on an ordinary outing, uploaded by him, and published without anyone's approval. YouTube's December 2005 release described the site as a place where users were "documenting news events as they happen" and sharing "first-hand accounts of their travels". The zoo clip is an early example of exactly that.

The same openness produced the platform's later conflicts—over copyright, moderation and recommendation algorithms—which belong to YouTube's later history rather than to its founding. For the social platforms of the same period, see Facebook, MySpace and Twitter.