Exactly 20 years ago, three former PayPal employees launched the YouTube.com resource, originally conceived as a dating site with the slogan “Tune in, Hook Up” – “Tune in, meet”.
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The founders of the project Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim tried their best to attract users, so they posted the first video on YouTube. Now it has become a famous, but otherwise unremarkable video “Me at the Zoo” (“I am in the zoo”), on which Karim talks about elephants in the San Diego zoos. So they created a platform on which any Internet user can watch and upload a video.
The scale of YouTube today is difficult to overestimate: for some viral videos on the platform have become chaos and a source of numerous copyright disorders, for others – a revolution in the spread of content. A year after the start of Google, I purchased YouTube for $ 1.6 billion. In October 2006, Karim said what this project turned out for him: “If you have a good idea and you just shoot the video, you can get a millionth audience almost instantly and free “.
In the history of YouTube there were also difficult moments – in particular, problems with data protection, the publication of unacceptable content and the controversial algorithms of recommendations. Nevertheless, the ME At the Zoo video is still available on the platform. He has 348 million views, but by the standards of YouTube this is far from the most popular video.