In today’s digitalized world, we spend a considerable amount of our daily lives on various social media platforms. YouTube is one of those social media platforms that people love. The video-sharing service has more than 2 billion monthly active users all around the world. They consume more and more video content on YouTube in every passing month. However, it wasn’t always like this. So when did Google Buy Youtube?
First Years of YouTube
YouTube was launched in 2005 as a hub to share amateur videos by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. They were all former employees of PayPal before they quit their jobs to create YouTube. Karim’s “Me at the zoo” video is the first video on YouTube, dating back to the 23rd of April in 2005.
The trio had the idea that common people will enjoy sharing their home-made videos. In addition to that, there wasn’t a reliable way to share videos with other users on the web at that time. As a startup, they initially received an $11.5 million investment from Sequoia Capital in 2005. Just after a year, YouTube hit the 25-million views per day mark. In the summer of 2006, YouTube served more than 100 million views each day with no sign of slowing down anytime soon.
This extremely quick growth led to many problems. Co-founders started to spend more and more money on computer equipment, broadband connections, employee payments, and copyright infringement cases. While they were couldn’t come up with better strategies to monetize the website. So they started looking for a buyer.
Acquisition of YouTube by Google
Google bought YouTube in October 2006 for $1.65 billion. At the time, YouTube was still relatively small compared to what we see today. Google advertised the acquisition as “the next step in the evolution of the internet.”
In May 2007, YouTube announced the YouTube Partner Program that enabled creators to make money from their videos. Later in 2007, YouTube started showing ads for the first time, initially located on the bottom of videos. In late 2012, “Gangnam Style” became the first video on YouTube to hit 1 billion views. While in January 2016, “Hello” from Adele became the fastest video to hit 1 billion views in 87.4 days.
YouTube Today
Over the years, YouTube enjoyed remarkable growth and achievement in profitability, popularity, user interaction, copyright problems, and many more. YouTube also faces many new challenges, such as safety for kids, original content, and freedom of speech.
Today, YouTube keeps improving with many new features, changes, and adaptations to the current world. In the future, YouTube is expected to grow its user base and increase its profits.
Conclusion on When Did Google Buy YouTube
YouTube was a garage startup of three computer engineers, namely Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. After its launch in 2005, the website quickly became one of the most visited video platforms globally and bought by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion. YouTube is one of the most successful startup stories there is and still inspires many entrepreneurs all around the world.
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