It’s February 14, 2025. You know what that means? Yes, Happy Valentine’s Day, but there’s also something else worth remembering today.
YouTube has officially turned 20 years old.
That’s right, the internet’s biggest video platform as well as one of the most trafficked websites in the world, was founded on Feb. 14, 2005.
At least, that’s when three former PayPal employees – Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim – got together and decided on a name: YouTube. As Karim later explained in an early re-telling of YouTube’s history, “the work began” on YouTube on Feb. 14, 2005. The YouTube dot com domain name was registered 20 years ago on that date.
However, the video platform you know and love today was certainly not what they had in mind. While the founders have previously shared other reasons behind starting YouTube, such as not being able to find clips of the infamous Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson Super Bowl halftime show online, the reality is that the first iteration of YouTube was a dating website.
That’s right, YouTube was first intended to be an online dating site.
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YouTube in April 2005 as saved by the Internet Archive
Credit: Internet Archive
In fact, you can go check it out and confirm it yourself by looking at the earliest archived version of YouTube that’s saved in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine from April 2005. Prominently featured at the top of the page, right below the login section, is an area to input your gender identity, the gender of the type of person you’re looking to find, and an age range you’re willing to date.
The YouTube dot com domain being registered on Valentine’s Day is starting to make sense now, right?
Unfortunately, for Chen, Hurley, and Karim, no one signed up for YouTube, the dating website. The three even posted on Craigslist, looking for women to upload a video for $20, in hopes that would kickstart activity on the website, according to a Vice story from 2015. No one took them up on that offer either, according to the YouTube founders.
The first YouTube video ever
YouTube’s co-founders decided to ditch the dating aspect of the site shortly after and opened up YouTube to all types of video uploads. With that pivot, the YouTube founders themselves decided to upload the very first video to the site themselves. On April 23, 2005, Karim uploaded “Me at the zoo,” a video featuring the founder talking directly to a camera about elephants while standing in front of the animals at the San Diego Zoo.
YouTube would officially launch in December 2005.
Even though YouTube is now synonymous with online video, it actually wasn’t the first video platform on the internet. Vimeo, for example, had launched a whole year prior to YouTube’s launch.
However, the same week as YouTube’s official launch to the public, Saturday Night Live aired its “Lazy Sunday” sketch by The Lonely Island. An unauthorized upload of the video was published on YouTube and went viral, cementing YouTube early on as the online destination for viral clips.
Less than one year later, in November of 2006, Google would acquire YouTube for $1.65 billion.
Topics
Social Media
YouTube
