Would you believe that YouTube started as a dating site? The world’s most popular video hosting and sharing website was initially going to be for nothing more than hooking up and dating.
YouTube is of course the king of the online video market. It has succeeded in making ordinary people famous and has launched several successful careers. From its humble beginnings when the first video was uploaded until today, where thousands of videos are uploaded every minute, the site has become a behemoth of the online world. But it could have all been different. Very different indeed. It seems that YouTube started as a dating site. One of those seedy places people look for love online. But even though YouTube started as a dating site, it also had other inspirations that launched it.
Three friends who first met while working at PayPal, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim are the founders of YouTube. When they left PayPal they decided to start work on a project together. This was going to be the dating site, Tune In Hook Up. When the idea finally faded away, they went looking for more ideas to launch a site. You’ll never guess what the inspirations were. Boobs and tragedy.
You must remember that the idea for a video sharing site sprung up in 2004. Back then the internet was a big place, but not as big as it is today. Sure, tragedy and breasts have always been easy to find online, but there were two incidents that proved extremely difficult to find. They were the Asian tsunami and the Janet Jackson wardrobe malfunction. The YouTube founders were a little frustrated at the lack of video online of the two events, and decided to do something about it.
Before long the trio had collaborated and created one of the best websites to ever exist thus far. Their creation was all thanks to a failed dating site, the Asian tsunami and Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction nip slip.
Bonus fact
The very first video on video YouTube was a simple, not very exciting clip that runs for 20 seconds. It is titled Me at the zoo and was uploaded by YouTube co-founder Jarwed Karim at 8:27 P.M. on Saturday April 23rd, 2005 and was shot by Yakov Lapitsky at the San Diego Zoo. Although the video at first glance is uninspiring, it began a worldwide phenomenon that has become YouTube.
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