Chad Hurley was born ion 24th January 1997, in Birdsboro, Pennsylvania. After college he worked at the PayPal division where he met Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who late came together in 2005 to create You Tube. Steven Hurley worked for PayPal, until it was aquired by eBay in 2002. Later Hurley left the company and moved to Silicon Valley to work as a consultant. While Steve continued to work with PayPal for two more years. In January 2005, Steve hosted a party for his friends at his own and Hurley was one of the guests. Both of them together recorded the party on a camcorder and a digital camera, but was not able to send the recordings to their friends and guests because of the massive file size. It was then that the two came up with an idea of creating a site to help the people to share their videos. they wanted to do something along the line of Flickr. which was one of the new websites back then. That facilitated the sharing of photographs.
This gave birth to You Tube. After a few days the team brainstormed a good name and a memorable and consumer friendly logo that Hurley actually designed. The website was launched in February 14, 2005 and a sneak peak was offered to interested parties in May 2005. However potential You Tubers had to wait another six months to freely enjoy the site. Like most Start Ups You tube employees worked from their home. they employed roughly around 8 to 10 enthusiasts who were working without any pay.
Well once You tube hit the Blogosphere and Slashdot they never looked back. the fist video published on You Tube was me at the zoo uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim, which was only 19 seconds long. Well in no time You Tube became a huge success. Later in September 2005 You Tube got it's first 1 million hit video. the video was a Nike ad that went totally viral. Nike was also the first company to embrace You Tube's promotional potential. Later it secured a 3.5 Million dollar funding from SEQUOIA Capital, and made an official launch in November 2005. It was then followed by an $8 million during April 2006. By July 2006 the company revealed that more than 65 thousand videos were being uploaded everyday and videos were viewed more than 100 million times a day. It slowly became the 10th most popular website in the world. This much growth in such a short time was unbelievable. you tube witnessed another success and what can be said as legendary milestone decision in the world of business. this tech video startup got acquired by Google for a price of $1.65 Billion. the idea of the two technology pioneers turned out to be such a revolutionary force and community creating phenomena. That made Google by You Tube which was the second largest acquisition at that time.
Later in 2007 You Tube launched its partner program to let people get paid for their viral content. This was the first time You Tube made it possible for everyday people to turn their hobbies into a business. About a year later the most successful people were earning six figure income from You Tube. Later the same year a baby named Charlie took over the world with his 56 second video where he's seen biting his brother's finger and then laughing. Later Google decided that it was time to start making money and ruled out the first ads for You Tube in August 2007.
In April 2009 Justin Bieber was introduced to the world via a video on You Tube. But later he went on to become one of the world's biggest stars. One of his music videos named Baby is one of the most watched videos till date. Later in 2012 You Tube witnessed a tsunami of views with Gangnam style going viral across all platforms. it hit 1 billion views in December 2012 and currently over 2.8 billion views.
Well today You Tube has created so many stars, launched careers and much more. It has also created a platform for creating, discovering , sharing and viewing content that might have never made it into the public spotlight. But with over 300 hours of content uploaded every minute and over 5 billion videos being viewed everyday, You Tube can be called as one of the greatest tech inventions of all time.
No comments:
Post a Comment