Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim first founded the YouTube, at that time they were working for PayPal. Before PayPal, Karim and Chen studied CS at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Chad studied design from Indian University of Pennsylvania. The first headquarter of the YouTube company was held in San Mateo, California above the Japanese and Pizzeria restaurant.
On 14 Feb 2005, the domain, logo and trademark of YouTube was registered by Hurley. In May 2005, right after the three month, they first launched the website named as www.youtube.com.
The very first video of the YouTube was uploaded by its cofounder Jawed Karim, whose title was “Me at the Zoo”. It was posted on 23 April 2005, the video was about Jawed Karim who was showing San Diego Zoo.
In 2006, during the summers, YouTube was acknowledged as one of the fastest growing websites on internet, hosting about 65000 daily video uploads. In July, the website reached the average of hundred million daily views. Its rank was 5 on Alexa, which means it was the fifth most popular website on the web, even it crossed the growth of MySpace. According to the Nielsen/NetRatings, YouTube’s average monthly audience was around 20 million, in which 56 percent were males and 44 percent females. The age group of 12 to 17 was the dominant group. At that time, there were also different online YouTube to Audio converter software, which can convert YouTube videos into mp3 format.
Google purchased YouTube Company on 9 Oct 2006 for 1.65 billion dollars in stock; it was completed on 13 November. It was the second biggest acquisition of Google at that time. The YouTube and Google’s agreement was came when YouTube put three agreements with media companies so that they can avoid copyright-infringement lawsuits. When Google purchased it, YouTube planned to work independently along with its staff including cofounders as well.
In 2006, YouTube was featured as the annual Person of the Year in Time Magazine. In a magazine they featured the user-created data i.e. the content posted on YouTube and cited the founders of YouTube with different content creators as well. In 2006, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal also reviewed YouTube’s user-created content with specific regard to its effects on corporate recruitment and communications. In the same year, YouTube was the 9th best product in the list of Top 10 Best Products of 2006 as per PC World magazine. Both Dime Magazine and Sports Illustrated featured the reviews of basketball video with a title of The Ultimate Pistol Pete Maravich MIX.