E-business Report 2

YouTube

YouTube began in 2005 above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim who were former employees of PayPal, came together and invented a video website unlike any before it. They chose the domain name “You” tube because it was a website designed for “you”, everyday people, to post videos about almost anything they wanted. The partners offered a public preview of the site a few months before it was supposed to launch. YouTube was started by an angel-funded group in a garage. An angel funded group, or an angel investor is someone who puts money into a business start-up. Sequoia Capital invested 3.5 million dollars into YouTube in November. Chad, Steve, and Chen’s former boss at PayPal decided to get on the board of directors for YouTube. YouTube experienced very popular growth and because of this, Sequoia invested another 8 million dollars into the web site. YouTube was one of the fastest growing web sites and in its first summer experienced 65,000 video uploads a day and over 100 million video views. It even outranked Myspace’s growth. The website averaged nearly 20 million visits every month. It was visited mostly by adolescents from ages 12-17. In 2006 YouTube was trying to escape the threat of being sued for copyright-infringement when Google bought them. Google purchased YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars. It is also said, Google and YouTube were in competition with each other so Google bought them out. YouTube continued to grow in 2007, using as much bandwidth as the entire