YouTube is a popular free web site which lets users upload, view, and share video clips. The wide variety of site content includes movie and TV clips and music videos, as well as amateur content such as videoblogging.
YouTube, now owned by search giants Google, is a video sharing website where netizens could upload, view and share video clips liberally and for free. There is no upper limit as to the number of video clips that can be uploaded in the website by a single person. As a result, at present, there are over 1.5 billion video clips in its library and an average of 70,000 clips is being added to it daily. YouTube uses Flash Player 8 to play the videos.
Despite YouTube's huge user base, content library, and hit count popularity, it is still a very small company at the administrative level, staffed by only about 60 employees.
YouTube,Inc. was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, who were all early employees of PayPal.
YouTube had a humble beginning in February 2005, in a garage in California, and none at that time thought that it’ll be such a huge hit amongst netizens in less than two years. Seeing its burgeoning popularity, investment firms like Sequoia Capital chipped in with valuable investments to help the fledgling new product, and soon the website began to make profits. It was at this juncture that Google, who were on an expansion spree, took note of YouTube and expressed interest in acquiring it. Eventually, on October 9, 2006, they bought it for $1.65 billion in stock, the biggest purchase made by Google till date.
Today, YouTube is one of the fastest growing portals in the World Wide Web, and according to Alexa rankings for 2007, it is the tenth most popular website in the cyberspace, far outpacing even the popular community website MySpace’s growth.
YouTube
Type:
Private
Founded:
February 2005
Headquarters:
San Mateo, California, USA
Key people:
Chad Hurley, Founder & CEO
Steve Chen, Founder & CTO
Jawed Karim, Founder & Advisor
The company's humble beginnings in a garage and commitment to offering free services necessitated outside financial backing.
In November of 2005, venture capital firm Sequoia Capital invested an initial $3.5 million; additionally, Roelof Botha, partner of the firm and former CFO of PayPal, joined the YouTube board of directors.
In April 2006, Sequoia put an additional $8 million into the company, which had experienced a boom of popularity and growth in just its first few months.
