New York, (EFE).- Twenty years ago, on February 14, 2005, YouTube was born on the internet, designed as a tool for ordinary people to share videos made at home. However, neither its founders could have predicted how this platform would transform the audiovisual and entertainment fields.
Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, former employees of PayPal, a US e-commerce firm, were the ones who conceived this idea.
The First YouTube Video
‘Me at the Zoo’ (Me at the Zoo), uploaded by Karim, is the first video on the platform. In it, the young man, then in his twenties, is seen in front of the elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo in California, in a clip that lasts less than 20 seconds.
‘The good thing about elephants is that they have really long trunks, and that’s great. That’s all I wanted to say,’ Karim comments in the video, which, since its publication on April 23, 2005, has accumulated over 348 million views.
This video is now a milestone in ‘audiovisual history.’
Currently, YouTube hosts over 14,000 million videos, more than one and a half per person on the planet, according to a study by the University of Massachusetts (US) conducted last year.
The diversity of content on the platform ranges from ‘How to…’ tutorials, teaching how to change a light bulb or apply makeup, to music videos and covers. YouTube has been a springboard for artists now recognized as Justin Bieber, Dua Lipa, and Ed Sheeran, among others.
It has also served as a stage for superproductions like those of MrBeast, who recreated the games of the series ‘Squid Game’ in a video that has achieved over 742 million reproductions.
Youtuber, a Profession
The relevance of YouTube has evolved to become a professional career: full-time content creator, popularly known as ‘youtuber.’
Children between 8 and 12 years old prefer to be youtubers over astronauts, according to a global survey by Harris Poll and Lego in 2019, with almost 30% of the votes in favor of being a YouTube content creator.
Jimmie Donaldson, alias MrBeast, with over 360 million subscribers, is the youtuber with the most subscribers. This 26-year-old young man, since 2016, has published nearly 850 videos that have become costly superproductions.
Donaldson revealed to Time in 2024 that his channel generates between $600 and $700 million per year. ‘Each video earns me a couple of million in advertising revenue, plus millions from partnerships with brands,’ he stated.
Although the most well-known accounts are from the US, India also has significant presence on YouTube. T-Series, a record label and film producer from that country, is the second channel with the most subscribers, reaching 286 million.
The New Rivals
Google acquired the startup YouTube for $1,650 million in 2006. At that time, YouTube was not yet generating profits, and this acquisition became the most expensive for Google in its first eight years.
‘This marks the next step in the evolution of the internet,’ declared Eric Schmidt, Google’s CEO at the time.
Since then, competitors like Twitch from Amazon, and Instagram and TikTok, the latter with an uncertain future in the US, have emerged, seeking to displace YouTube in user preference.
Sarah Yáñez-Richards
credits of the images of this post: Deultimominuto.net
