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6 P a r t I Marketing Your Business Online with YouTube

A Short History of YouTube

If you’ve never visited the YouTube website (shown in Figure 1.1), you’ve missed out
on the hottest thing on the Internet today. It’s hard to believe that YouTube is barely
five years old; what did we do online before there were YouTube videos to watch?

Figure 1.1 The YouTube site—home base for all your online video marketing.

YouTube: The Early Days

YouTube was the brainchild of three former PayPal employees: Chad Hurley, Steven
Chen, and Jawed Karim. The three founders had left their former company and were
looking for a new business opportunity. After exploring a few less interesting ideas,
they eventually realized there was a real need for a service that facilitated the process
of uploading, watching, and sharing videos. Hence the development of YouTube.
The trio registered the domain name YouTube.com on February 15, 2005 and then
started developing the technology for the site—in Hurley’s garage. Chen, the pro-
grammer of the bunch, worked with Adobe’s Flash development language to stream
video clips inside a web browser. Hurley, a user interface expert, adopted the con-
cept of tags to let users identify and share the videos they liked. Together they came
up with a way to let users paste video clips onto their own web pages, which
expanded the reach of the site.
The development work done, a public beta test version of the site went live in May
2005. After a few months of working the kinks out of the site, the three men offi-
cially launched YouTube in December 2005.