YouTube

  • Creation of Vimeo

    Vimeo was founded in November 2004 by Connected Ventures, the parent company of the humor-based website CollegeHumor, as a side project of web developers Jake Lodwick and Zach Klein to share and tag short videos with their friends. "Vimeo" from Wikipedia is available under the CC-BY-SA license, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vimeo.
  • Creation of YouTube

    Three former PayPal employees—Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim—created the online video-sharing platform service in February 2005.
  • First YouTube Video

    The first YouTube video, titled Me at the zoo, shows co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo.
  • Official Launch of YouTube

    Following a $3.5 million investment from Sequoia Capital in November, the site launched officially on December 15, 2005, by which time the site was receiving 8 million views a day.
  • SNL Sketch Popularizes YouTube

  • TED talks

    In June 2006, after June Cohen's idea of a TV show based on TED lectures was rejected by several networks, a selection of talks that had received the highest audience ratings was posted on the websites of TED, YouTube, and iTunes. Initially, only a handful of talks were posted, to test if there was an audience for them. In January of the next year, the number of TED Talks on the site had grown to 44, and they had been viewed more than three million times.
  • Google acquires YouTube

    On October 9, 2006, Google announced that it had acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock.
  • Sal Khan tutors on YouTube

    After tutoring his cousins and family using a table, Salman Khan decided to make his videos watchable on the Internet, so he published his content on YouTube. Positive responses prompted Khan to quit his job in 2009, to focus full-time on creating educational tutorials (then released under the name Khan Academy).
  • MIT OpenCourseware

    MIT OpenCourseWare (MIT OCW) is an initiative from MIT to publish all of the educational materials from its undergraduate- and graduate-level courses online, freely and openly available to anyone, anywhere. The project was announced on April 4, 2001 and uses Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. In 2008, OCW transitioned to using YouTube as the primary digital video streaming platform for the site, embedding YouTube video back into the OCW site.
  • Two billion YouTube viewers per day

    In May 2010, YouTube videos were watched more than two billion times per day.
  • CrashCourse Videos

  • One billion hours of YouTube watched every day

    In February 2017, one billion hours of YouTube were watched every day