February 14, 2025, marks the 20th anniversary of YouTube, the internet’s largest video platform and one of the most visited websites globally. Founded on February 14, 2005, YouTube was the brainchild of three former PayPal employees, Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, who collectively came up with the name. According to Karim, work on the platform began on this date, and the domain name YouTube.com was registered.
Initially, YouTube was envisioned as a dating website. The founders have mentioned various inspirations for its creation, including the difficulty in finding clips of the Super Bowl halftime show featuring Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson. However, the first version of YouTube was intended for online dating.
Proof of YouTube’s original purpose can be found in an archived snapshot from April 2005 on the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The website featured prompts to enter gender information and preferences for potential matches, justifying the Valentine’s Day registration of the domain.
Unfortunately for Chen, Hurley, and Karim, the dating website concept failed to gain traction. They even attempted to attract users by offering $20 for women to upload videos, as reported by Vice in 2015, but there were no takers.
The founders soon abandoned the dating site idea, opting to open YouTube to all video uploads. The first video, titled “Me at the zoo,” was uploaded by Karim on April 23, 2005. It featured him speaking about elephants at the San Diego Zoo.
YouTube officially launched to the public in December 2005, even though it was preceded by platforms like Vimeo, which launched a year earlier. The site’s popularity surged when “Lazy Sunday,” a sketch from Saturday Night Live by The Lonely Island, was uploaded without authorization and went viral. This pivotal event established YouTube as a prominent platform for viral content.
In November 2006, less than a year after its official launch, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion.
