YouTube celebrates year 20

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Over the past 20 years, Google-owned YouTube has become the world’s most-watched video platform, bar none. It’s the home base of countless self-made influencers, podcasters, commentators and entrepreneurs and over time has made it into the big leagues of TV through rights deals with the NFL, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery and NBCUniversal.

The platform that helped introduce the world to streaming with its launch two decades ago has had a twisty-turny journey in Hollywood on its way to establishing itself as a digital household utility. If you want to find anything on video, the search invariably starts on YouTube. This is a dramatic shift from the first few years of YouTube’s existence, when most of Hollywood viewed the Silicon Valley-born company as a copyright-infringing pariah.

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When YouTube was incorporated in February 2005 by three former PayPal employees — Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim — the start-up was housed in Hurley’s garage in Menlo Park, California. The very first video was uploaded April 23, 2005, by Karim; titled “Me at the Zoo,” it was a 19-second clip he shot in front of the elephant exhibit at the San Diego Zoo.

The founders actually launched the platform as a site for video dating. But after one week, not a single person had uploaded any videos. So they pivoted to promoting YouTube as a general-purpose video-sharing platform.

It was a long-shot idea, as it wasn’t clear at the time whether the internet could support video delivery at scale, says Roelof Botha, managing partner of Sequoia Capital, the Menlo Park-based venture capital firm that has backed some of Silicon Valley’s most world-beating start-ups. Botha led Sequoia’s total investment of $8.5 million in YouTube.

Two decades later, the platform is a massive fire hose that sprays out every kind of content imaginable, watched by an estimated 2.44 billion monthly users in 2024, according to researcher eMarketer. There are vlogs, how-to videos, comedy sketches, music videos, news segments, talk shows, product reviews, video-game playthroughs, life hacks, animated shows, podcasts, TV clips, full movies and movie trailers, stunts, pranks and challenges. More than 500 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. It’s the No. 2 most-visited site in the world, behind only Google.com, and the second-biggest search engine after Google.

Worldwide, users watch on average more than 1 billion hours of YouTube content on TVs every day, according to the company. In the U.S., TVs recently surpassed phones and tablets as YouTube’s No. 1 viewing device. According to Nielsen, for two years running, Americans have spent more time watching YouTube on their TV sets than any other streamer, including Netflix, Disney+ and Amazon Prime Video.

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