Looking back, the original idea behind YouTube seems almost quaint. The mythic founding story goes like this: in January of 2005, two PayPal employees, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, were at a party. People were taking photos and videos on their digital cameras. Sharing photos was easy, sharing video was anything but. âPeople have different video types, video codecs they have to download, video software,â Chen said on Charlie Rose in 2006. He and Hurley had a sense that as digital cameras and cameraphones became ubiquitous, more people were going to want to share their footage. âWe tried to simplify the process, to make it as easy as possible to share these videos online.â By the end of the year, their simple platform was already a huge hit.
Fast forward to today, the 20th anniversary of the first-ever YouTube video upload, and the numbers have become so big theyâre basically meaningless. Three and a half billion people watch YouTube every month, according to one study. Googleâs earnings show it brought in about $36 billion in ad revenue alone last year. YouTube gets 50 percent more viewership than Netflix, and about as much as Disney, Prime Video, Peacock, and Paramount …
