Website homepages through the years: YouTube.com
It is time for another deep dive into the history of some of the UK’s most visited websites and today we are taking a look at a video website which arguably changed our culture forever – YouTube.
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The origins of YouTube
The idea for YouTube was created during the early months of 2005 and launched on 15th December of that year. The website was created by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawad Karim who were all former employees during the early days of PayPal which at the time had been recently bought out by eBay.
The three creators however have all recollected different stories as to the inspiration of the website. Chen and Hurley both state it was created after they wanted to send video footage they shot at a dinner party to Karim but were unable to do so. However Karim’s version is probably much less wholesome as he alleges they created the site due to the Super Bowl XXXVIII Halftime Show controversy of the previous year, where Janet Jackson infamously experienced her “wardrobe malfunction” and exposed her breast to the world during a performance with Justin Timberlake. Karim says footage of the moment was hard to find online which led to the creation of the website.
Also interestingly the site was originally designed as a dating website and was partly influenced by the website Hot or Not. On this website, users could rate photos of people based on their attractiveness, YouTube was going to be a platform where people could rate videos instead. There are examples of the three creators posting adverts online asking attractive women to create videos for a $100 reward. However when few women took this idea up they changed course to allow users to upload any type of video.
2006: Initial launch
YouTube was first launched in December 2005 and it clearly looks very different from the homepage we come to expect today, however it does have many of the core features of the platform. People could upload videos, watch and share. You can also see along the top there is an option to favourite videos and subscribe to people’s channels.
Interestingly there was also a Friends tab which appeared to work in a similar way to Facebook friends in that you would have a news feed which featured your friends videos and possibly was created as a result of the early days of YouTube being a dating app.
The navigation is also very basic with lots of links on the page just looking like regular hyperlinks. It is also similar to early layouts of the BBC website in that everything is in a centralised location with lots of white space on the left and right hand sides.
2007: Acquired by Google
By the end of 2006, the popularity of YouTube had caught the attention of Google who in a deal acquired the brand from the creators for $1.65 billion in Google stock which they finalised in November of that year.
By 2007 the website had begun to reflect the change in ownership.
The logo of the website now has the slogan “Broadcast Yourself” which was one of the key aspects to the website’s success. We can also see the Friends option was dropped and also on the right hand side the login option allowed users to login with either their YouTube credentials or a Google account.
Also added was a Promoted Videos section, which was the start of monetization of the website. By the end of the year video ads and pre roll ads began to appear, showing advertisements before and during videos.
Further down the site also launched a blog section which is still active today. An interesting fact at the time, which highlights the site’s rapid growth in popularity is the Daily Telegraph reported the site used more bandwidth than the entire internet in 2000, just seven years prior.
2009: Music Videos and “Shows”
In 2009, the site again began to make some more changes. On the sidebar there was a brand new “Shows” feature which was launched in the USA and in the UK. It was a partnership deal with movie and TV show companies such as MGM and Lionsgate to allow their shows to be on YouTube with ads in between. However this idea was later abandoned and the URL now redirects to YouTube’s paid digital video platform which we will discuss later.
During 2009, the site also launched a deal with the music video website Vevo to show music videos on the platform. The deal proved to be very successful early on with Lady Gaga’s music video to Bad Romance being the first video to surpass 200 million views on the platform in early 2010.
2012: The first video to get 1 billion streams
In 2012 the site experienced another overhaul as Google decided to make the site more user friendly in a style which is quite similar to the website today. The top navigation was now replaced with a sidebar on the left and also videos were broadly categorised into Music, Sports, Gaming, Movies, TV Shows, News and Spotlight. The site also began to recommend channels on the left hand side and the top navigation changed to a simple and clean Search / Upload or Log in.
By this point the site had also swapped the video player to be HTML5 rather than Flash and also added automatic subtitles to videos by the end of the year.
The sites rating system was also overhauled at this time with the star rating system being changed to a simple Like or Dislike button. For existing ratings, those 3 and above were treated as likes and below 3 were dislikes, the algorithm also began to reward videos based on watch time rather than overall views which led to a sudden surge in gaming channels becoming popular.
The site also began to experiment with new ways of making revenue, it launched a rental platform, allowing users to pay for movies and TV shows to watch through YouTube and launching a premium option to pay a subscription for certain channels.
By 2012 YouTube had also grown significantly in popularity when it was estimated that there were 2 billion views of video content on the website per day, nearly double the prime time audience of all three of the major US TV networks combined. Another landmark was also hit when the music video to Psy’s Gangnam Style became the first video to surpass a billion views on the platform.
2014: YouTube Premium
In 2014, the site had some minor changes to the layout, new categories for Education and Live appeared on the left hand side as YouTube launched its live streaming feature in 2011 and it had become increasingly popular over time.
In 2014 the site launched a paid subscription service called “Music Key” as well as “YouTube Red”, the former allowed people to subscribe to find music content on the site whilst YouTube Red allowed people to subscribe to premium content and channels created on the platform., as well as view videos ad-free Both of these have since been rebranded to “YouTube Music” and “YouTube Premium” respectively. In 2015 this was expanded further with “YouTube Kids” and “YouTube Gaming” intended to target younger audiences and gaming fans respectively.
2019: Controversies and Advertiser Boycott
By 2019, the site had introduced a number of different features. The main screen changed so that videos were shown in rows with thumbnails being the same size, whereas before there was one larger video and smaller related ones around it.
On the left hand side, the Education tab was dropped, replaced with Spotlight and a 360 degree video. The 360 degree option was launched in 2015 and allowed users to record a video in full 360 with a further live stream option added in 2016.
However during this time the company increasingly faced criticism over its advertising policies. In 2016 the popular YouTuber gaming channel, PewDiePie. was found to have posted Anti-Semitic jokes in his videos. Meanwhile the following year a number of companies pulled advertising when it was discovered they were being shown on videos with connection to ISIS and religious extremism. This resulted in a change in YouTube’s policies with videos being demonetized if they didn’t comply with the new regulations.
YouTube Kids was also found to be increasingly unsafe with extremist videos appearing on the app and comments being highlighted to suggest a paedophile ring had begun targeting the platform. Further adding to the controversy in 2019 the company was fined $170 million after it was discovered YouTube processed data of children under the age of 13 without parental consent.
2022: Controversies, Covid-19 and TikTok
During the Covid-19 pandemic, YouTube like many other online video platforms experienced a massive surge in usage as lockdowns hit across the world. It was estimated YouTube was accounting for 15% of all web traffic at the time, which was twice its pre-pandemic level. In fact traffic was so high government bodies such as the EU requested the site to lower it’s video quality to allow government and medical emergency websites to continue operating which they complied with.
One of the biggest additions to the site in terms of content changes, was the arrival of “Shorts” which was no doubt influenced by the meteoric rise of TikTok at the time and allowed users to post short one minute-videos on the platform, similar to its rival.
The site did also meet with further controversy that same year after it made a decision to remove the Dislike count from videos. Though some praised the move as a way of preventing trolling and cyberbullying, others saw it as a form of censorship as big entertainment companies used it to hide dislike counts on their videos and trailers for upcoming movies.
Overall there’s no doubt YouTube has formed a massive part of our cultural fabric both online and offline and started the trend that allowed ordinary people to create their own platforms and potentially build an audience for themselves. However as newer platforms such as TikTok continue to rise in popularity it will be interesting to see how this platform adapts over the coming years.
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