There are many platforms that in recent decades have been inserted into our day to day lives, but undoubtedly one of the most successful is YouTube. We have all used it to search for a song, a viral video or to find out about some news. However, YouTube goes further, surpassing the 2 billion users per month who watch millions of hours of content per day. With this, it has become stiff competition for traditional television and numerous streams, which shows its incredible success.
February 14 is known for celebrating Valentine's Day, Valentine's Day, and it could be said that on that day, in 2005, a love story took place, that of YouTube with the internet. That was the moment when the domain of the video hosting service was activated, although it was not until a few months later that content was uploaded to the page for the first time. The creators of YouTube were Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim and Steve Chen. The first two worked as engineers and the last as a designer, at PayPal, where they met and became friends. There are several stories about how the idea came about that have been corrected and even denied over the years by the protagonists themselves. At first, it was said that everything arose during a party, in which they wanted to share some videos and found themselves with many difficulties, hence the first embryo of what would later become the platform was born.
Another of the stories tells that the project at first consisted of a place to find a partner where those interested could post videos making themselves known. As stated by the BBC, Steve Chen himself stated during a conference in Texas that they realized that the idea was not going to work, although they concluded that the formula of sharing videos they had created had many possibilities, so they opened the space so that content of all kinds could be shared.
'Me at the zoo'
After a couple of months since the website was registered, the first video in the history of YouTube was uploaded on April 23, 2005. This homemade audiovisual piece, which was titled 'Me at the zoo', was barely 18 seconds long and featured one of the creators, Jawed Karim, on a visit to the San Diego Zoo, in California, with no further content to explain how "cool" the elephants were. The video, which is already the history of the internet, has accumulated more than 150 million views, almost seven million 'likes' and more than 11 million comments.
18 months after they were founded, Google knocked on their doors to buy them, and from there it went from being an amateur video collection site to the powerful original content creator platform that it is today. With fame, more and more users were uploading all kinds of content, including music clips or TV shows. This reached such a massive level that YouTube was forced to create a regulation not to infringe copyright rights.
These are 16 years of history that bet to be many more, since the trend of use on the site is being strongly transferred to the younger generations.
