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 .
Sunday, July 15, 2007
YouTube Story
YouTube Story
Most of use You Tube , but do you know atleast who founded it or how was it founded. Let's look a t the full story.
YouTube was founded by three former PayPal employees Jawed Karim , chad, chen.Chad Hurley, Steve Chen
got the idea for Youtube when, after a dinner party at Steve's San Francisco apartment. They taken some video's of the event had wanted to share it . They had Problem sharing videos of the event. This event sparked the idea of a creating a video sharing tool.
No company, of course, is ever founded in a single moment, and YouTube evolved over several months. The acutal credit for YouTube goes to a Wired Magazine article about BitTorrent by Clive Thompson in the magazine’s January 2005 issue. The story included the calculation that 867,000 people watched Jon Stewart’s brilliant on-air harangue against Crossfire, while three times that many saw it online. Karim says he was captivated by the idea of an emerging clip culture.
Witnessing the boom of online grassroots video, realized the need for a decent service that made the process of uploading, watching and sharing videos hassle-free. The confluence of broadband penetration, Flash 7, digital cameras and phones, and cheap bandwidth also contributed to the YouTube’s birth .They registered the domain YouTube.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.
First video was uploaded on April 23, 2005 by Karim, it shows Karim himself standing in front of elephants at the zoo. “The cool thing about these guys it they have really, really, really long trunks,” he says. That’s about it.
READ You Tube's success story
Friday, June 29, 2007
You Tube's first video
This is the YouTube's first video. Thi swas uploded by Jawed one of the founders of youtube. As expected this is the most watched that he has uploaded. This video has approx 95k views.This is 18 min long and has 2* RATING.
THIS IS THE URL http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNQXAC9IVRw
Saturday, June 23, 2007
Jawed Karim- Youtube founder
Karim was born in Merseburg, East Germany in 1979 and moved to West Germany in 1982. His father, Naimul Karim, is a Bangladeshi researcher at 3M. His mother, Christine Karim, is a research assistant professor of biochemistry at the University of Minnesota.
Karim grew up in Germany, and his family moved to the United States in 1992. He graduated from Central High School (Saint Paul, Minnesota), and went on to attend the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.He left campus prior to graduating to become an early employee at PayPal, but continued his coursework, earning his bachelor's degree in computer science in 2004.
While working at PayPal, he met Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. The three later founded the YouTube video sharing website in 2005. After co-founding the company and developing the YouTube concept and website with Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, Karim enrolled as a graduate student in computer science at Stanford University while acting as an advisor to YouTube. When YouTube was acquired by Google, Karim's 137,443 shares of stock were valued at $64.6 million, while his cofounders each earned around $326 million.
He has uploaded the first video on Youtube See it
Check out his Youtube profile
Monday, June 18, 2007
Steve Shih Chen
Steve Shih Chen is the co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of the popular video sharing website YouTube.
Chen was born in August 1978 in Taiwan. Hegrew up in Taiwan until the age of 8, when his family emigrated to the United States. He attended high school at John Hersey High School as well as the Illinois Math and Science Academy and college from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He was an early employee at PayPal, where he met Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim. In 2005, the three founded YouTube, a video sharing website.
He currently holds the position of Chief Technology Officer at YouTube. Chen was also an early employee at Facebook, although he left after several months to start YouTube. In June 2006, Chen was named by Business 2.0 as one of the "The 50 people who matter now" in business. In August 2006, Chen told Reuters news agency it was hoped that within 18 months the site would "have every music video ever created."
On October 16, 2006, Chen and Hurley sold YouTube to Google, Inc. for $1.65 billion. Chen received 625,366 shares of Google and an additional 68,721 in a trust as part of the sale. The Google shares that he received were worth $326 million at Google's Feb. 7, 2007 closing stock price of $470.01.
Check his Youtube Profile
To know more about him click Steve ChenSunday, June 17, 2007
Chad at PayPal
Also, it was during his days at PayPal that he met Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, two PayPal engineers with whom he talked about several ideas for businesses. In 2002, when eBay bought PayPal for $1.54 billion, Hurley received a bonus which he used to finance their future venture. Another link that helped their future venture was their connection to Roelof Botha, the South African former PayPal CFO.
Chad Hurley- Youtube founder
Chad Meredith Hurley is the co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of the popular San Bruno, California-based video sharing website YouTube, one of the biggest providers of videos on the Internet.
Chad Hurley was born in 1977. He grew up near Birdsboro, Pennsylvania, with an older sister (Heather) and a younger brother (Brent). His parents are Donald Hurley, a financial consultant, and JoAnn, a school teacher. Since childhood, he showed interest in the arts.
He worked in eBay's PayPal division . He was involved designing the original PayPal logo . He satarted YouTube with fellow PayPal colleagues Steve Chen and Jawed Karim.
Hurley is a user interface expert and was primarily responsible for the tagging and video sharing aspects of the site. In June 2006, he was voted 28th on Business 2.0's "50 people who matter" list. In October 2006 he sold YouTube for $1.65 billion to Google.
Check out Chad's YouTube Profile
Youtube Story
YouTube was born when the founders (Hurley, Chen, and Karim) wanted to share some videos from a dinner party with friends in San Francisco. It was January 2005, and they couldn't figure out a good solution. Sending the clips around by e-mail was a bust: The e-mails kept getting rejected because they were so big. Posting the videos online was a headache, too. So they got to work to design something simpler.
In 11 months the site became one of the most popular on the Internet because the founders designed it so people can post almost anything they like on YouTube in minutes. Members, who can comment on videos and set up their own sites on YouTube, add tens of thousands (or more) new videos a day. Steve Chen points out that "From Day One we concentrated on building a service and community around video. That made us a lot different from the iTunes and the Googles out there."
Like many technology start-ups, YouTube was started as an angel-funded enterprise in a small and inexpensive office or garage. In November of 2005, venture capital firm Sequoia Capital invested an initial $3.5 million additionally, Roelof Botha, partner of the firm and former CFO of PayPal, joined the YouTube board of directors. In April 2006, Sequoia put an additional $8 million into the company, which had experienced a boom of popularity and growth in just its first few months
During the summer of 2006, YouTube was one of the fastest-growing websites on the World Wide Web, and was ranked as the 5th most popular website on Alexa, far outpacing even MySpace's growth. According to a July 16, 2006 survey, 100 million clips are viewed daily on YouTube, with an additional 65,000 new videos uploaded per 24 hours. The site has almost 20 million visitors each month, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, where around 44% are female, 56% male, and the 12- to 17-year-old age group is dominant. YouTube's preeminence in the online video market is staggering. According to the website Hitwise.com, YouTube commands up to 64% of the UK online video market.
