7. Youtube Was For Video Dating
Whilst working at Paypal three young, budding entrepreneurs decided to create an online dating platform.
All in their late 20s, the trio were obviously finding it hard to meet women in the tech industry as they registered the domain YouTube.com on Valentine’s Day 2005.
Chad Hurley, Steven Chen, and Jawed Karim wanted the site to be for casual hookups – like Tinder but at the start of the social media revolution.
The dating part of the site never took off, but their video upload service was very easy to use. Similarly to the story of Instagram the tech entrepreneurs redesigned the site purely for video uploads, and YouTube was born.
It’s 2005 and for those who can remember uploading and watching videos online was not the walk in the park that it is today.
With an easy-to-use interface, the platform made it accessible to the nontechnical crowd, which was one of the major reasons for its success.
The video-sharing platform grew exponentially, and after just six months, was achieving millions of views a day, making it one of the fastest-growing websites on the internet.
Such was the impact the site was making on the industry in late 2006, Google purchased it for over $1.5 billion.