YouTube history: The founding and growth of the video platform

YouTube was founded in 2005 by three former PayPal employees: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. The platform was created to solve the technical difficulties of the early 2000s, such as slow upload speeds, inconsistent video formats, and the lack of smooth browser-based playback.

By making video easy to upload, stream, and share via links, the founders enabled non-experts to publish content without professional studios. A landmark moment in the platform's early history was the upload of the first video, ‘Me at the zoo’, featuring co-founder Jawed Karim. Following rapid growth and exploding traffic, Google acquired YouTube in 2006 to provide the necessary resources for global scaling and hosting.