YouTube and whatever happened to its founders
YouTube and whatever happened to its founders
Just fourteen short years ago, above a pizzeria and Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California, three young ex Paypal employees-Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim had a dream to create a user-friendly video-sharing platform where potential users could share videos highlighting their travels, personal experiences, and favorite movies. Little did they know that the social media platform they called “YouYube” would become a megalithic enterprise that would be worth in the region of $40 billion fourteen years later.
Today, Youtube has managed to grab almost ½ of the world’s internet users, gaining a phenomenal one billion unique users from all walks of life who view over seven billion hours of video every single month. The internet would never be the same again. It would take its founding fathers just fourteen short years to achieve a success unparalleled to anything the online world had ever seen before, and perhaps since.
The growth of YouTube from the first-ever Youtube video, a short 19-second video named “Me at the zoo,” uploaded by one of youtube’s founding members “Jawed Karim” under the user name “Jawed,” a video which had no music, just a rathered bored-looking Jawed Karim who was seen in front of a few elephants saying, “All right, so here we are in front of the, uh, elephants, and the cool thing about these guys is that, is that they have, really long, um, trunks, and that’s, that’s cool, and that’s pretty much all there is to say.” It was described by “The Observer” as being of poor quality; however, the Los Angeles Times has since said that the video ushered in the golden era of the sixty-second video and was responsible for altering how people digested and consumed media of their own choice today.
Today the YouTube video “I At The Zoo” has generated over 79 billion views and has become a bastion of just how simply a video can be created using the YouTube social media platform, thus turning many of us into would be Hollywood producers and directors.
From then on, just like little acorns, YouTube exploded across the world wide web, and only five months later, in September of 2005, a Nike promotional film that showed the footballer Ronaldinho juggling a set of footballs reached over a million global views, Youtube had come of age, and it was just five months old.
At this point, it would be remiss of me if I did not mention that YouTubes’ early success was helped on its way with a massive injection of cash by Sequoia Capital, who invested $3.5 million into the fledgling company, an investment which I am sure they have got back many times over in the years that followed.
Youtube, just like many other high profile social media platforms, was purchased by the internet giant Google in November of 2006 for a price tag of US$1.5 Billion, not bad for a company that had only been in business for a few months.
What happened to the YouTube founders after they sold YouTube to Google?
The simple answer is that all went on to create many other things:
Steve Chen and Chad Hurley created “AVOS Systems,” a platform where developers can develop Apps in real-time. After leaving, he became a partner at Google Ventures, where he still acts as an advisor today while juggling his time between a new online website he has created called “NOM,” a live cooking platform.
Chad Hurley
Chad, as mentioned above, was also a founding member of AVOS Systems along with Steve Chen. While working here, they purchased Delicious from Yahoo, which was quickly sold off to MixBit, another video-sharing platform. After Steve Chen decided to leave AVOS Systems, Chad and the rest of AVOS Systems focused solely on MixBit.
Chad also loves formula one racing, basketball, and soccer, so much so that he is now a part-owner of the Golden State Warriors basketball team and the Los Angeles Galaxy soccer team.
Jawed Karim
After Youtube, Jawed founded and launched his venture capital fund named Youversity Ventures, better known as Y Ventures, which had part of their portfolio the company called “Milo,” which eBay purchased Airbnb. Apart from this, he is still a very active investor, investing in many other companies.
How does Youtube or Google pay its contributors?
For starters, if you want to earn money from your YouTube videos by adding Google Adsense adverts to them, you must set up a YouTube Channel. Then, you must generate at least one thousand subscribers to your channel, something which can seem daunting to some YouTube users. Once you have all these subscribers, you will then have to wait until you have earned a minimum of 4,000 public watch hours. Once this has happened, then the sky is the limit, and you can begin to place Google Adsense adverts on your Youtube Channel.
In ending, YouYube, according to many analysts, was purchased from its founding fathers at a steal of a price. As Google never divulges just how much revenue is generated by the YouTube platform, we rely on analysts. However, we do know that potentially, Youtube earns more than Twitter’s projected balance of $30 billion, and Facebook, it is known, has topped over 200 billion. Hence, the chances are that Youtube’s net value forms a significant part of the estimated $400 billion in Google’s net worth.
So that’s it, folks, keep uploading those videos, and I thank you all for taking the time to read this short narrative. I would also like to thank America’s favorite place to shop online, BargainBrute.Com, for giving me the platform to write.
Go over and find out just why they have been voted America’s favorite place to shop online. You will not be disappointed. If you are looking for those Christmas gifts or unique Christmas clothes and groceries, you will not find a better place as they have some of the top deals found anywhere on the internet. Join the thousands who have become part of the BargainBrute family today.
Kind Regards and thanks once again for reading.
