YouTube turns 20 years old today
Twenty years ago, three former PayPal employees launched YouTube.com, originally intended as a dating website with the slogan “Tune In, Hook Up.”
The co-founders—Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim—struggled to attract users, so they created YouTube’s first video themselves. The clip, titled “Me at the zoo,” featured Karim at the San Diego Zoo.
In doing so, they built a platform where anyone with an internet connection could upload and watch videos.
What did people do with this newfound power?
What they’re still doing today.
Flooding the internet with clips from Saturday Night Live—Like Lazy Sunday, one of the early viral videos.
Swiftly removed at NBC’s request but later restored on Youtube, the video highlighted a key tension in YouTube’s rise. For some, it was a chaos of copyright infringement; for others, a breakthrough in short-form video democracy. The following year, Google bought YouTube for more than $1.6 billion.
In October 2006, Karim shared with students at his alma mater, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, what it all meant to him: “If you have a good idea, and you just go out there and you make a video, you can — you can get an audience of millions almost instantly for free,” he said.
Over the years, YouTube has faced controversies—over data collection, toxic content and radicalizing algorithms.
But “Me at the zoo” is still there, reminding viewers of a more innocent time. With 348 million views, it’s a far cry from the most-watched video.
If you clicked to listen above, our apologies, dear readers—we have “Baby Shark”
Anthropic to pay authors $1.5B to settle lawsuit over pirated chatbot training material
The artificial intelligence company Anthropic has agreed to pay authors $3,000 per book in a landmark settlement over pirated chatbot training material.
You can trust the jobs report, Labor Department workers urge public
A strongly-worded statement from Bureau of Labor Statistics workers comes a month after President Trump attacked the integrity of the jobs numbers they release monthly.
Headed to the FBI, Missouri’s Andrew Bailey opposed abortion, backed Trump
Andrew Bailey rose quickly to be state attorney general of Missouri where he built a record for fighting abortion and defending Donald Trump. Now he's a co-deputy director of the FBI.
How Chicago, Baltimore and New Orleans are reacting to Trump’s National Guard threats
Even after a federal court ruled his use of the National Guard in LA was illegal, the president has weighed sending troops to Chicago, Baltimore and New Orleans. Here's where things stand in those cities.
Watching a neighbor’s cat turns lethal in ‘Caught Stealing’
Darren Aronofsky's film is a funny, bloody valentine to 1990s New York City. Though awfully engrossing, Caught Stealing's mix of rambunctious slapstick and bone-crunching violence doesn't always gel.
Hundreds of South Koreans are among 475 detained in a Georgia immigration raid
"The business activities of our investors and the rights of our nationals must not be unjustly infringed," a foreign ministry spokesman said after about 300 South Koreans were detained.