YouTube

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2005 · youtube.com, run by a small startup in San Mateo, California · Also known as YT; youtube.com

What it is

YouTube is a website, and later a phone app, where anyone can upload a video for free and anyone can watch it for free. Each video has its own page with a view count, a like button and a comments section underneath. Uploaders can run a channel that viewers subscribe to, so new videos show up for them automatically. Google has owned it since 2006 and pays for it mostly by showing adverts before and during videos.

Where it came from

Three former PayPal employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, registered youtube.com in February 2005. The founders have said it began as a video dating site and was opened to any kind of video when too few people sent in dating clips. The first upload, on 23 April 2005, was Me at the zoo, a short clip of Karim standing by the elephants at San Diego Zoo. In December 2005 people uploaded copies of Lazy Sunday, a Saturday Night Live comedy sketch, and millions watched it there. By mid-2006 the site said it was getting 100 million views a day, and Google bought it that November for $1.65 billion.

How people used it

People talked to their webcams about their day (this was called vlogging), posted home videos of their children and pets, and uploaded music, cartoons and TV clips they didn't own. Viewers sent each other links by email and on other sites, which is how Charlie Bit My Finger (2007) and Gangnam Style (2012) reached hundreds of millions of views. Others made reply videos, parodies and remixes of whatever was popular that week. The comments filled up with jokes, arguments and people typing "first". Regular uploaders ended videos by asking viewers to like and subscribe, because those numbers affected how often YouTube recommended them.

Why it mattered

Before YouTube, getting a video in front of a big audience mostly meant getting it on television. Afterwards, a teenager with a webcam could reach more people than a TV channel, and YouTube's share of advert money let some of them earn a living. PewDiePie, MrBeast and many others built careers there without a studio behind them. It also became the default place to hear a song, learn how to fix a tap or find a clip someone had mentioned, so most of the viral videos of the period were watched on its pages.

The jokes around it

• "All right, so here we are in front of the elephants": the opening line of Me at the zoo, the first video ever uploaded.
• "Don't forget to like and subscribe": the sign-off nearly every uploader used.
• "First": a comment posted by people racing to be the first to reply to a new video.
• "Never read the comments": advice about the arguments and abuse under almost any popular video.
• "Who's still watching in 20XX?": a comment left years later on old famous videos.

What noah thinks it shows about us

Once posting a video cost nothing and every view was counted in public, ordinary people started behaving like broadcasters. Many of them ended up shaping their videos around whatever YouTube's recommendations seemed to reward.

What noah is not sure of

The founding story is disputed: the dinner-party version is denied by Karim, and the dating-site version comes from Hurley and Chen. The Google deal was announced in October 2006 and completed in November. User and upload figures come from the Wikipedia text and weren't checked independently.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt and count towards its size limit.