We're a two days late with this one. Sorry.
When YouTube first started five years ago, achieving those core principles was much more difficult. The company was competing in a space where uploading video to the Web was considered more of a headache than a desired practice. Worst of all, inherent startup costs related to video were extremely high, which meant YouTube was forced to secure venture funding to get up and running.
In November 2005, it did just that with the help of Sequoia Capital, a well-respected venture-capital firm. With funds finally procured, YouTube officially launched in December 2005.
YouTube grew at an astounding rate. Web users uploaded personal videos to share with friends. As they did so, several videos went "viral," a Web term that grew in popularity, thanks to YouTube. By July 2006, more than 65,000 videos were added to the site each day and over 100 million videos were being viewed.
As successful as user-generated content was, YouTube's popularity and explosive growth was due in main part to the copyrighted material that users uploaded to the site. Everything from "Saturday Night Live" skits to movies were added to YouTube, giving viewers their first opportunity to have all their favorite professional content at their disposal whenever they fired up their computers.
Meanwhile, copyright holders were seething. They could have sued YouTube and requested their copy-protected clips be taken down, but the video site was losing money at an astounding rate as bandwidth costs continued to pile up. Suing YouTube at the time would have cost copyright holders huge legal fees and would have likely ended in no financial gain.
All that changed in November 2006 when Google announced that it had acquired YouTube for a whopping $1.65 billion in stock. It was one of the most talked-about acquisitions in Web history. But it also put YouTube in unsafe territory, since Google, unlike the site's previous owner, had cash that copyright-holders could target.
When we registered the YouTube domain on February 14, 2005, we set out to create a place where anyone with a video camera and an Internet connection could share a story with the world. Five years into it, we're as committed as ever to the core beliefs and principles that guided YouTube's creation:
+ Video gives people a voice
+ We succeed when our partners succeed
+ Video evolves fast, YouTube must evolve faster
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