YouTube Story

Who doesn't use YouTube.But it wasn't always successfully initially it went through a series of bad phases.Let's look that their success story.

You tube was founded by three former Pay Pal employees.Chad Hurley, Steve Chen Jawed Karim after a dinner party at Steve's San Francisco apartment. They had Problem sharing videos of the event. This event sparked the idea of a creating a video sharing tool. They registered the domain You Tube.com on February 15th, 2005 and developed the site over the following months from a garage in Menlo Park. In May 2005 they launched in a public beta. Problem was, nobody used You Tube.

Once they had the site up and running, Karim and partners Steve Chen and Chad Hurley set about pitching the site to every Wired writer they could find. Nobody bit.

To try to attract viewers, the three figured the best thing would do would be to get hot chicks involved. So They posted an ad on Craigslist in Los Angeles promising attractive females $100 if they’d post 10 videos on You Tube. They got not a single reply.

Finally to get a decent start and attract the initial crowd they were looking for they came out with a contest that promised to give out one iPod Nano to a random member each day, which ran for two months. This contest worked on a point-based system, for example one point was rewarded for signing up, one for inviting others, another one for posting a video, etc. The more the points you gained, the higher the chance of winning you had. This was a significant action that got You Tube noticed by the masses and gave it a head start as per the signups. After all, if you knew you had a chance to winning a $250 iPod Nano just by signing up and posting a clip you've had on your hard-drive for the past few years, wouldn't you?

In June 2005, You Tube revamped, adding the four essential features that jump-started viral growth.
1) related video recommendations
2) one-click emailing to spam a friend about a video
3) more social networking and user interaction tools like video comments
4) an external video player.


All this catapulted You Tube's growth.The most important was the external video player .This was one of the first company to do it. Several blogger and website owners started using You tube to add video's on to their site. The idea of related video also caught on pretty well.

When Jon Stewart appeared on CNN’s Crossfire in October, more people watched the clip on You Tube than saw it on television. That sharp uptick of growth made it possible for YouTube to raise $3.5 million in November 2005 from Sequoia. Right after the first meeting, Karim recalls, the You Tube guys watched the entire Sequoia office, including the secretaries, register and start using the service.

You Tube.com had a staff of 20 and made its official debut on December 15, 2005. In 2006, the total number of clips available on You Tube also reached 25 million with users uploading 20,000 new videos a day. By April their bandwidth costs was approaching $1 million per month . You Tube gained an additional $8 million in funding from Sequoia Capital . In May, You Tube’s viewership surpassed that of CNN.com . It was responsible for 43% of all videos viewed on the Internet .

Despite all this their success they were running into losses. The reason for this was that a more than 20,000 video's were being uploaded each day. Their bandwidth cost was increasing exponentially mainly because of their success. Since most videos were not original You Tube had to face a lot of copyright issues.

This made it You Tube Founders to sell such a great products. They contacted Yahoo , Viacom and several others . They wanted a price of over 1.5 Billion since they had to pay pay huge bills. On October 9, 2006, it was announced that You Tube was being purchased by Google for 1.65 Billion in stock.

This news gave You Tube all the attention.Now every one was using You Tube. More than 50% of the net users used You Tube. Every blogger uploaded video's from You Tube on their blog.

Now, after being the host of countless SNL segments, Superbowl ads, TV goof-ups, Anime mashups, Nobodies Watching episodes, Sporting segments, Shakira music videos, and most recently the Lonely girl15 installments — which have managed to receive more than 90 million views in total You Tube has become world's fastest growing website .