5-YouTube

The domain was registered on February 14, 2005. Valentine’s Day, which was not a coincidence. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, all early PayPal employees, had an idea for a video dating site. The tagline was “Tune In, Hook Up.” You would upload a short video of yourself, browse videos of other people, and find someone. The pitch was that video would tell you in ten seconds what a text profile and a flattering photograph could hide indefinitely. It was a reasonable idea. It had a clear market, a clear business model, and an obvious advantage over the incumbents. Nobody uploaded anything. The founders tried increasingly undignified fixes. Karim has described posting ads on Craigslist offering to pay women $20 to upload a dating video. There were no takers. The site sat there with a purpose-built video pipeline and no videos in it. The first thing ever uploaded to YouTube — “Me at the zoo,” April 23, 2005 — is nineteen seconds of Jawed Karim standing in front of the elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo, observing that elephants have really, really long trunks. It is not a dating video. It exists because the site needed something in it and no one had sent a profile. Then people began uploading anyway — just not dating videos. Clips of their friends. Pets. Skateboarding. Fragments of television. The founders had built a fast, simple pipeline for getting video onto the internet and playing it in a browser without a plugin war, at a moment when doing that was genuinely hard, and the audience simply ignored the stated purpose and used the pipe. The founders’ decisive act was surrender. They dropped the dating framing and opened it up: upload anything. That is the entire pivot. No new technology, no new architecture — just removing the constraint they had imposed on their own product. Volume exploded. Then, in late 2005, a Saturday Night Live sketch called “Lazy Sunday” leaked onto the site and pulled in millions of views, demonstrating that YouTube was not merely a place for home movies but a distribution system that could carry culture faster than the networks that made it. Google acquired YouTube in October 2006 for $1.65 billion, twenty months after the domain was registered. It is now the second most-visited website on earth and the foundation of the entire creator economy — an industry of individuals making a living from video, which did not exist in any recognizable form on Valentine’s Day 2005. The thing worth noticing is how thin the line was. The founders built exactly one valuable asset: the easiest way to put a video on the internet. They wrapped it in a use case that was wrong. The users, ignoring instructions entirely, revealed what the asset actually was. The lesson: when people use your product for the wrong thing, the wrong thing is your product. Your job is to stop arguing with them. PS Thank you for bringing us Justin Bieber!