YouTube

YouTube is an online video-sharing platform headquartered in San Bruno, California. It was created by three former PayPal employees––Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim––in February 2005. YouTube has been owned by Google since 2006, when Google acquired the company for $1.65 billion. YouTube is one of the top visited websites in the world, ranking second to Google's search engine as of 2021. YouTube receives approximately 34.6 billion monthly visits. The majority of content uploaded to YouTube is posted by individuals, though some is uploaded by news organizations and corporations. Commonly uploaded content includes TV and movie clips, music videos, trailers, vlogs, and education.

YouTube.com was officially registered on February 14, 2005, by former PayPal employees Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. YouTube has two origin stories. The more commonly known is that the founders established the website after recognizing that there was no existing central website for sharing videos on the internet. They were supposedly inspired by two major events that took place in 2004: the Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami and Janet Jackson's wardrobe malfunction at the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show. A later story revealed that the website was originally intended to be used for video dating, but the founders were unsuccessful in recruiting women to upload video profiles of themselves. After this idea failed, they chose to make it a website for general video sharing.

The first video uploaded to YouTube was titled "Me at the zoo," posted by cofounder Jawed Karim in April 2005. The beta version of the website was launched in May and ended in December after YouTube raised a multi-million dollar investment from Sequoia Capital. By that time, YouTube was receiving more than two million views per day. Just one month later, daily views soared up to twenty-five million. In March 2006, YouTube reached twenty-five million videos with more than 20,000 videos uploaded on a daily basis.

Me at the zoo, posted by cofounder Jawed Karim.

Google announced its acquisition of YouTube on October 9, 2006, in a stock deal valued at $1.65 billion. Eric Schmidt––Google's CEO at the time––said of the transaction, "This is the next step in the evolution of the internet." In May 2007, YouTube launched its Partner Program, enabling creators to monetize their videos. Google introduced ads to YouTube in August 2007. In April 2009, the platform won a Peabody Award. Also in April 2009, YouTube partnered with Universal Music Group to create Vevo, a music video hosting platform. Vevo is owned by Universal, and its ad revenue is shared with YouTube. Vevo launched in December 2009 and was immediately popular, gaining more traffic than any other music video website in the world.

In March 2010, YouTube introduced its rating system of thumbs-up or thumbs-down to indicate a like or dislike of a video. YouTube Live, a livestreaming feature, was launched in April 2011. In June 2012, YouTube merged with Google Video. The platform created its first subscription feature in November 2014 with Music Key, which was superseded by YouTube Red one year later in November 2015. YouTube Premium replaced YouTube Red in May 2018.

On April 5, 2018, a mass shooting occurred at the YouTube headquarters in San Bruno, California. The perpetrator, Nasim Najafi Aghdam, was the only one killed. Three others were injured.

Following the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic in March 2020, YouTube reduced the default bandwidth of its videos in response to an increased streaming demand of unprecedented proportions due to stay-at-home orders. The company also established a news section for Covid-19 on the home page. YouTube introduced several new features throughout 2020 and 2021, including video chapters, a shoppable ad format, an account mode for parental supervision, and publicly hidden video dislikes. Handles were brought to the platform in October 2022.

YouTube users can view and interact with videos in various ways, such as through comments, liking or disliking, and sharing. Users can subscribe to other channels, and doing so alerts the subscriber when the channel uploads a new video. Any registered user can upload a video. Content commonly uploaded to YouTube includes movie or TV show clips, songs, music videos, trailers, vlogs, gaming, reviews, and how-to guides. Some content is restricted to subscribers of YouTube's services. Content matter can involve anything barring YouTube's content restrictions, which include rules against nudity, self-harm, violence, misinformation, hate speech, and other deceptive or dangerous content. The most popularly uploaded content to YouTube is gaming, although the most viewed content is music. The top ten most viewed YouTube videos of all time are all music videos.

Eligible YouTube creators can monetize their channels through the YouTube Partner Program. To be eligible, users must have gained at least 1,000 subscribers with 4,000 valid public watch hours in the last twelve months, or 1,000 subscribers with ten million valid public Shorts views in the last ninety days. Creators can choose to monetize their channels through different means, including Watch Page ads, Shorts Feed ads, memberships, Super Chat, and YouTube Shopping. Another available monetization feature through the YouTube Partner Program is Google AdSense, which posts advertisements on videos.

YouTube Premium, previously YouTube Red, is a paid subscription service that offers features including ad-free videos, video downloads for offline viewing, and background play. YouTube Red was introduced in 2015. The name was changed to YouTube Premium in 2018, and the subscription cost increased by $2 to $11.99. However, newly included with the service was YouTube Music, which is separately valued at $9.99.

YouTube Kids is a separate YouTube platform providing only child-friendly content. It was introduced in February 2015. Parental controls for the platform are available.

Launched in May 2018, YouTube Music is a music streaming service offering a variety of media, including official songs, albums, playlists, and YouTube's own catalog of remixes, live performances, covers, and music videos. The service eventually replaced Google Play Music.

YouTube TV was launched in select US cities in April 2017. YouTube TV allows for television channel streaming; it also provides access to YouTube Originals.

YouTube Shorts are a short-form vertical video feature. Shorts were introduced in September 2020 as a beta feature to users in India. They were brought to users in the United States in March 2021. YouTube Shorts were created to compete with the popular short-form video app TikTok.

Stories were introduced to YouTube in 2018. YouTube Stories are short video uploads for the purpose of sharing things like informal updates and upcoming video previews with viewers. Stories are posted for seven days before disappearing. YouTube Stories were only made available to users with more than 10,000 subscribers. Due to a lack of popularity, YouTube Stories is scheduled to be removed from the platform on June 26, 2023.