On February 14, 2005 — Valentine's Day — three former PayPal employees registered the domain youtube.com. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim had been working on an idea together for weeks. The idea was a video dating site.
The original concept was specific: people would upload short videos of themselves, describing who they were and what they were looking for. Potential matches could browse and respond. It was video profiles for online dating, at a moment when YouTube-style video hosting didn't really exist and the technology to make it simple was only just becoming viable.
The tagline they used early on was "Tune In, Hook Up." The domain was registered on Valentine's Day deliberately. The product was, from the beginning, designed around romantic connection.
The Problem: Nobody Uploaded Dating Videos
The founders launched with their concept in early 2005 and waited. People visited the site. They didn't upload dating videos. They uploaded other things — clips from TV shows, home videos, footage of their pets, a video of Jawed Karim himself at the San Diego Zoo standing in front of the elephant enclosure and talking about elephant trunks for nineteen seconds.
That video — uploaded on April 23, 2005 — is still on YouTube. It's titled "Me at the zoo." It has no production value, no editing, no purpose beyond being a test upload. It was the first video ever uploaded to YouTube, and it has 340 million views. The comment section is one of the more extraordinary things on the internet.
The founders watched what people were doing with the site and made a straightforward decision: forget the dating concept, let people upload whatever they want. The pivot wasn't agonized over. The infrastructure was the same. The concept changed completely.
The Name Had Nothing to Do With Dating
The name "YouTube" was Hurley's idea. He wanted something that communicated personal broadcasting — "you" as in the individual user, "tube" as in television (cathode ray tube was still the dominant TV technology in 2005). The combination was informal, approachable, and slightly irreverent in a way that fit the scrappy nature of the product.
The domain was already registered. The name stayed through the pivot because it was, if anything, more accurate for the general-purpose video platform than it had been for the dating site. "Your personal broadcast channel" was a better description of what the site was becoming than what it had been designed to be.
Chad Hurley — who had a graphic design background from Indiana University of Pennsylvania — drew the logo on a whiteboard. The red television screen with the white play button, "You" in white text and "Tube" in black text on the red background. The design was functional and recognizable, not the output of a branding agency. Hurley drew it. That was the logo.
Eighteen Months. $1.65 Billion.
YouTube launched publicly in November 2005. By July 2006, the site was serving 100 million video views per day. By October 2006 — eighteen months after the domain was registered, fourteen months after the first upload — Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock.
At the time, $1.65 billion for a company with no meaningful revenue felt surreal. YouTube was burning money on bandwidth and had not figured out monetization. Google's calculation was simpler: YouTube had a near-monopoly on online video sharing, and that position was worth defending at any price before a competitor could establish themselves.
The three founders collectively received approximately $1.65 billion in Google stock. Hurley and Chen remained with the company for a period after acquisition. Karim had already left to pursue a graduate degree at Stanford — he was formally listed as an advisor rather than an active employee — and received a significantly smaller stake. The dynamics of founder credit and equity have been occasionally contentious in accounts of the company's history; Karim has noted in various contexts that he felt his contributions to the original concept were sometimes understated.
The three founders split the acquisition proceeds unevenly based on their equity stakes. Hurley, as the primary designer and one of the driving forces of the pivot, held the largest stake. Chen held a significant stake. Karim, who had stepped back earlier, received less. The exact breakdown was never fully disclosed publicly, but estimates suggest Hurley received approximately $345 million, Chen approximately $326 million, and Karim approximately $64 million — all in Google stock.
The Platform That Changed Copyright Law
Within months of the Google acquisition, YouTube was the subject of a $1 billion lawsuit from Viacom — one of the largest copyright infringement claims in history at that point. Viacom alleged that YouTube knowingly profited from massive copyright infringement, with clips from Comedy Central, MTV, and Paramount films uploaded by users without authorization.
The case, Viacom International Inc. v. YouTube, Inc., wound through federal courts for years and became a landmark case in the interpretation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act's safe harbor provisions (Section 512). The question was whether YouTube qualified for protection as a passive hosting platform that responded to takedown notices, or whether it had specific knowledge of infringing content that negated the safe harbor.
The case ultimately settled in 2014 without a public determination or payment, after years of litigation and appeals that defined — with significant ambiguity — the boundaries of platform liability for user-generated content. The outcome matters for every platform that allows users to upload content: it established that responsive takedown policies are central to maintaining safe harbor protection, even if the exact standard for "specific knowledge" was never cleanly resolved.
Trademark Note
Google LLC (now Alphabet Inc. subsidiary) holds trademark registrations for "YouTube" and the play button logo across multiple international classes, including Class 38 (video streaming and broadcasting services), Class 41 (entertainment and educational video content services), and Class 42 (software and platform services). The distinctive red-and-white play button logo is registered as a design mark and is among the most recognized brand symbols in digital media globally. Google has actively enforced the YouTube marks against competing platforms using similar names or visual elements, particularly in international markets where YouTube's dominance is contested. The 2017 logo redesign — which moved "You" and "Tube" from the red box to plain text with a standalone red play button — updated the registered design marks accordingly.