14 DAY TRIAL // Everyone knows that things move fast on the web, yet there are plenty of times when this is as surprising as it has been for the past 15 years or so. YouTube is the biggest thing in online video and the site seems ubiquitous. There wouldn't be an internet without YouTube, certainly not the one we're familiar with, yet the site is just five years old having celebrated its birthday on Valentine's Day.
"When we registered the YouTube domain on February 14, 2005, we set out to create a place where anyone with a video camera and an Internet connection could share a story with the world. Five years into it, we're as committed as ever to the core beliefs and principles that guided YouTube's creation," Chad Hurley, cofounder and CEO of YouTube, wrote.
YouTube.com was registered on February 14, 2005, and the site took off soon after. Nobody could have predicted what the site would amount to and, at the time, nobody even knew if online video could catch on. It started off in rather crowded market and it could have just as easily ended up as one of its well-funded competitors, Veoh, did when it announced last week that it's filing for bankruptcy.
A couple of factors and maybe a bit of luck weighed in and the site quickly became a force to be reckoned with dominating the landscape to this day. Its ease of use was its main selling point, the site made it easy to upload videos, easy to view them, by using a Flash Player which has since become the industry standard, and easy to share them via the embeddable widget. A little over a year and a half after launching, YouTube was picked up by Google for a record sum of $1.65 billion and the rest is history.
Now, the site serves one billion videos every day and has a huge chunk of the video market. Its competitors are orders of magnitude smaller and it looks like nothing is going to stop YouTube's dominance any time soon. Five years on, though, the site still isn't profitable, though it's getting closer, and it's moving away from the user generated content model that put it here in the first place. Nevertheless, its founder still believes that the site's biggest strength is in giving more people a voice and a chance to have it heard.
"Thanks for being part of the YouTube community and for shaping what the site is today. We're looking forward to celebrating our fifth anniversary throughout the year and hope you'll keep watching, keep uploading, keep sharing, keep informing, keep entertaining, and keep discovering the world through video," Hurley added.