There is a long history behind the establishment of YouTube. Without efforts to trace its formation, a blunt declaration of the ownership of YouTube will do us less good. Therefore, permit me to tell a brief story surrounding the establishment of this great company. Let us know What To Know About YouTube?
Before February 2005, there was a meeting of three friends who conceived the idea of creating a video streaming platform online. The names of these three friends were Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim.
Steve Chen is a Taiwanese-American. He attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was born in August 1978. Chad Hurley was born in Pennsylvania, United States, in 1977. He is a webmaster and businessman who co-founded YouTube. Jawed Karim was born in 1979 in Merseburg, Saxony-Anhalt, East Germany. He is a software engineer. Jawed attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for his undergraduate program and Stanford University for his master’s.
According to our source, the first video that was ever posted on the YouTube platform was posted by Jawed Karim and was titled “Me at the Zoo.” It was posted on April 23, 2005, and it has been watched more than 246 million times.
18 months after it was launched, YouTube was bought from the three co-founders by Google. Answering the question of who owns YouTube can now be done on a positive note. YouTube was initially established by three friends: Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. Later, it was bought by Google. As of the time of writing this article, YouTube is a subsidiary of the Google Corporation.
What to know about YouTube?
We know YouTube as an online video-sharing platform. It has its headquarters office in San Bruno, California. It’s the second largest and most visited single website in the world after Google.
There are more than 2.5 billion users. That means almost 20% of the entire world population uses YouTube for one purpose or another.
Some sources reveal that there are more than 1 billion watch hours per day on the YouTube platform. It’s no surprise that there are more than 500 hours of videos that are uploaded on YouTube per hour. By implication, videos are being uploaded to YouTube every second or an hour per day.
You can either post videos on YouTube, which is called content creation, or just watch what other people create. It’s equally possible to do both. The truth is, there is nearly nothing you cannot find on the YouTube platform. Whatever you think about it, someone somewhere has posted something or something close to your search about it.
Opportunity on the YouTube
There are several opportunities that the YouTube platform has offered its esteemed users. There is no doubt about the fact that YouTube is one platform that offers an extremely level playing field for users from all over the world. The opportunities on the YouTube platform vary.
Discovery of one potential
In the past, you could have skill and talent, who care? Your skill is limited to your small environment. With YouTube, it has become clearer to all of us that talents are being discovered especially among the remotely located people in Africa, east Asia, South America, and the like where such opportunities are being denied in the past.
Source of information
Though you could spend all your day on the YouTube platform catching fun, yet, YouTube has grown beyond funfair, it can serve as an open source to explore and know a large amount of information. Like you can gather information on the Google search engine for research purposes and academic work, people now turn to YouTube to obtain information on any field.
While the information obtained on Google is in text format, YouTube provides a video format of the information. Obtaining information on YouTube becomes particularly interesting when it’s training. Training that involves technical knowledge can easily be viewed and understood simply by watching videos.
Opportunity to make money
YouTube is a multibillion-dollar platform. In the year 2020, YouTube declared a total revenue of $19.8 billion. That revenue surged to $28.8 billion in the year 2021. It’s expected to rise higher in the year 2022. YouTube is making all efforts to share that large amount of income with creative content creators.
To make money on YouTube, all you have to do is open an account and start creating content in any category of your choice. Accumulate 1,000 subscribers and 4,000 watch hours. With that, you’re qualified to apply for the YouTube partnership program and start enjoying the dividends of your hard work as YouTube places ads on your videos. As long as people click on your videos to watch and as long as they view the ads, you get paid.
YouTube social influence
How has YouTube affected our world and touched the lives of individuals other than the points discussed above?
First, like most other online information service providers, YouTube has aided in the free flow of information, which was difficult to obtain in the past. For instance, from a remote village in Pakistan, you can watch videos of events taking place in the United States or any other part of the world. It has been a major source of information in recent years.
Another good example is the war in Ukraine, the protests in Iran and China, the flood in Pakistan, the hurricane in America, child trafficking in sub-Saharan Africa, and so on. In the past, to obtain pieces of information like these in video format, you had to stay close to your television. Nowadays, such information can be obtained and viewed on your phone.
Despite all the good things said about YouTube, this platform has not escaped public criticism and government scrutiny. For instance, YouTube has been criticized for the role it’s playing in exposing underage children to uncensored adult products, the usage of the platform to spread misinformation capable of causing an uprising in society, the violation of the user’s privacy rights, and its response to copyrighted content shared on its platform.
Like it or not, YouTube has had more influence on our daily lives and culture and produced more millionaires in the last couple of years than any other platform in the world.
Conclusion
The formation and establishment of YouTube have a long history. It was initially formed by three friends, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, in the year 2005. It was first launched on 24th February 2005. The first video on YouTube was posted by Jawed Karim on April 23, 2005.
In October 2006, the founders decided to sell the company to the Google Corporation at a market share value of $1.65 billion. Ever since YouTube has remained a subsidiary of the Google Corporation. You know that Sergey Brin and Larry Page founded Google in the year 1998, Logically, it follows to say that YouTube belongs to Sergey Brin and Larry Page as the major stakeholders of the Google corporation.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Does YouTube belong to Google?
Yes. The taking over took effect in October of 2006. From that date, the ownership of YouTube was officially transferred to Google.
- What was the title of the first video posted on YouTube?
The first video posted on YouTube was posted by Jawed Karim on April 23, 2005. The title was “Me at the zoo.”
- How rich is YouTube?
YouTube is a multibillion-dollar video-sharing platform. The total revenue for the year 2021 was $28.8 billion. It’s expected to grow higher in 2022 and the future.
