YouTube's Little-Known Past

YouTube is now the world's largest video platform, with billions of users and millions of hours of content uploaded every day. Photo: NPR .

Two decades ago, on February 14, 2005, three former PayPal employees, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, registered the domain name YouTube.com. Years later, YouTube has become the world's largest online video platform, but few people know that it was not originally created to serve the purpose it serves today.

YouTube wasn’t originally intended to be the video-sharing site it is today. Instead, the platform was designed as an online dating site with the tagline “Tune In, Hook Up.”

Evidence of this still exists on the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, which archived the earliest versions of YouTube in April 2005. The YouTube interface at that time allowed users to choose their gender, the gender of the person they wanted to connect with, and their desired age range.

To add to the symbolism, YouTube.com was registered on Valentine’s Day. Despite a concerted effort to attract users, no one was interested in the idea of ​​video dating. The founders even posted an ad on Craigslist, offering $20 to any woman who would post a video on the platform, but no one responded.

Just a few months later, realizing that this approach was not working, the founding team decided to expand YouTube into a video sharing platform for everyone.

On April 23, 2005, Jawed Karim filmed a 19-second video of himself at the San Diego Zoo and posted it on YouTube under the title “Me at the zoo.” In the video, he stands in front of an elephant enclosure and talks about elephant trunks. The video was the first in YouTube history and is still on the platform with over 348 million views.

In December 2005, YouTube officially launched to the public.

YouTube in 2005 on the Internet Archive. Photo: Internet Archive.

Despite being open to the public, YouTube wasn't the first online video platform. Rival Vimeo launched in 2004, a year before YouTube. But YouTube made a significant breakthrough in the week it launched.

On December 17, 2005, NBC 's Saturday Night Live aired a skit called Lazy Sunday , performed by the comedy group The Lonely Island. A user secretly uploaded the video to YouTube. It quickly went viral, garnering millions of views in just a few days.

The incident sparked a debate: Is YouTube a pirate paradise or a democratic space for digital content? NBC quickly requested the video be taken down, but that didn't stop YouTube from becoming the top destination for people looking for popular content on the internet.

In November 2006, less than a year after its official launch, YouTube was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion . This was a huge number at the time. Especially when YouTube still had no clear business model.

Just a month after the deal, Jawed Karim returned to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where he studied, and shared the YouTube philosophy. “If you have a good idea, just make a video and post it, you can get millions of viewers instantly without spending a dime,” he said.

After being acquired by Google, YouTube continued to grow rapidly and became the most popular video platform in the world. However, YouTube's two-decade journey has not been smooth.

The platform has faced numerous scandals related to privacy, toxic content, as well as its recommendation algorithm, which has been accused of creating "echo chambers" and radicalizing users.

YouTube's content moderation policies are also controversial. On the one hand, they are criticized for being too strict in censorship, but on the other hand, they are condemned for not doing enough to prevent misinformation and harmful content.

Still, YouTube remains the world's largest video platform with billions of users and millions of hours of content uploaded every day.