It seems like they’ve been around forever, but YouTube’s roots only go back as far as January 2005 when the idea was born in a garage.
Feb 2005 start
The domain name was registered the following St Valentine’s Day, with the first video being uploaded at 8:27PM on Saturday April 23rd, 2005. The video was shot by Yakov Lapitsky at the San Diego Zoo and you can how rubbish it is below:
First beta – March 2005
The first public beta opened up on March 22nd 2005, and by the end of that year an astonishing 8 million videos were being watched every day.
With traffic soaring, Google bought up YouTube in October 2006, and by December 2008, even ‘er Majesty The Queen was getting in on the act and addressing the nation via one’s computer screen.
By October 2009, YouTube was notching up one billion page views per day, a figure that is now in excess of 2 billion views a day.
Bang up
Google have declared 2010 to be a “bang-up year” (whatever that means) and have announced plans to grow their number of employees by more than 30% in 2011.
If you fancy a job, drop them a line.
