YouTube

YouTube
Historical
Date Created	February 14, 2005
Creator	Jawed Karim
General
Type	Website
Status	Online

Description

YouTube is a video-sharing website created in 2005 in San Mateo, California by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. It is the 2nd most visited website in the world, and on average, the site gets one billion views a day.

History

Creation

YouTube was created in February 14, 2005 in San Mateo, California, by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. The trio were all early employees at "Paypal," who left enriched after the company was bought by eBay. The origins of the website is debated. According to a story often repeated in the media, Hurley and Chen thought of the idea at a dinner party. Karim states that he was inspired by the 2004 Super Bowl incident, and later the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. He could not find videos of either events online, and so he got the idea for a video-sharing website. Hurley and Chen claimed that the original idea was a video-version of a dating site. The first video to be uploaded on the site was uploaded on April 23, 2005. Titled Me at the zoo, it showed co-founder Jared Karim at the San Diego Zoo at can still be seen on the site. In May, the company launched a public beta, and by November a Nike ad featuring Ronaldinho became the first video to reach a million views. The site launched officially on December 15, 2005.

Acquisition by Google

On October 26, 2006, Google announced that it had acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock. The deal was finalized on November 13, 2006. Google's acquisition caused newfound interest in video-sharing sites; IAC, which now owned Vimeo, focused on supporting the content creator to distinguish itself from YouTube. The company experienced rapid growth afterwards. The Daily Telegraph wrote that in 2007, YouTube consumed as much bandwidth as the entire Internet in the year 2000. By 2010, the company had reached a market share of 43% and more than 14 billion views. That year, the company redesigned its interface in order to simplify the interface and to increase the time users spent on the site.

Memes

Star Wars Kid

Star Wars Kid is a viral video made in 2002 by Ghyslain Raza which was posted on YouTube. The video shows the then 15-year old wielding a golf retriever in imitation of Darth Maul's lightsaber moves in the 1999 film Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace. According to court transcripts, the video first appeared on the Internet on the evening of April 14, 2003. Ghyslain did not intend to have it go public, but it's subsequent release led to ridicule of him.

Rickroll

The Rickroll is a bait-and-switch meme that involves tricking someone into watching or listening to the song Never Gonna Give You Up by Rick Astley. It originated on 4chan. It came from a similar meme, DuckRolling, which involved much the same tricks, but had you look at a duck on roller skates instead. It spread to YouTube and other sites later on.

Pufferfish eating a carrot

The Pufferfish eating a carrot is a meme of a pufferfish eating a slice of carrot. In the video, a pufferfish is taken from it's tank to be served in a restaurant. The pufferfish is given slices of carrot to eat. While eating, the pufferfish makes a sound which is the most well-known part of this meme. The pufferfish is then sliced up and served.

References

The information used in this article comes from Wikipedia and Know Your Meme.