YouTube was born from a failed dating site 20 years ago. Is the world’s biggest video platform facing another pivotable moment?
Evelyn Polacek Kery, University of Sussex
When three former PayPal employees, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, registered the domain name “www.youtube.com” 20 years ago, they wanted to create an online dating site based around videos of users. In 2016, Chen told the SXSW conference: “We thought dating would be the obvious choice.”
But despite offering to pay users to upload videos of themselves, nobody came forward. When their concept failed, they hatched a new idea for the same domain: “OK, forget the dating aspect, let’s just open it up to any video,” said Chen.
What followed was revolutionary.
Having started as a small project, YouTube rapidly grew into one of the most influential platforms in media history, reshaping journalism, media, entertainment and social interactions.
Its first-ever video, “Me at the Zoo” – featuring Karim casually describing the elephants at San Diego Zoo – set the tone for democratised content creation, and also the type of content that would become so significant for YouTube: vlogging – where people communicate their own blog-style entries on video, often delivered direct to camera.
The simplicity of uploading and sharing any type of video, combined with the potential of online content going viral, made the platform an instant hit.
In October 2006, just over a year after the video platform’s launch, Google acquired YouTube for US$1.65 billion (£1.3 billion) – a move that proved one of the most significant tech acquisitions in history. The platform embarked on monetising its growing library of content via online advertising, not only generating huge profits for Google but also providing content creators with a share.
The increasing profits prompted content creators to deliver better content.
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Whereas traditional media outlets such as television controlled video production and distribution, YouTube suddenly allowed anyone with a camera to share their voice. This shift led to the rise of independent creators, from beauty vloggers and gamers to educators and activists.
And so the platform has given birth to an entirely new profession: the YouTuber. Early pioneers built massive audiences, inspiring a new wave of content creators who could earn a living through ad revenue, sponsorships and crowdfunding.
In the UK in 2010, for example, a group of young content creators nicknamed “Brit Crew” became popular on YouTube. They were relatable, fun to watch, and uploaded videos regularly.
Today, the highest-paid YouTuber worldwide, according to Forbes magazine, is MrBeast, with more than 360 million subscribers and 10 billion views. In reality, MrBeast is Jimmy Donaldson, a content creator and businessman from Greenville, North Carolina. But the views his videos attract are still nowhere near the most-watched YouTube video of all time, “Baby Shark”, with 15 billion views.
Donaldson has often talked about understanding YouTube metrics and its algorithm as a key component to his success. He particularly pays attention to a measure known as “retention rate”, noting where viewers stop watching to improve his future videos. He says the algorithm prioritises things that are difficult to accomplish, such as getting high retention rates on a long video, over simply getting a large number of views.
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YouTube is the TV alternative everyone in the business (every broadcaster and cable operator out there) has to now actively compete with. The “streamers” really aren’t competition to YouTube. But YouTube is becoming the next-generation television “broadcast” network.