Told / Retrieval

Here's What People Thought of YouTube When It First Launched in the Mid-2000s

It took a while for pundits and other observers to truly understand the power of the new platform.

by Matt Novak via Paleofuture on February 14, 2020

...already looked at what people thought of Amazon when it launched in the mid-1990s and iTunes when it launched in 2001. But what did people think of YouTube in its early years, after the domain was purchased on February 14, 2005, and the website was developed shortly after that?

YouTube’s birth in 2005

Founded by Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, YouTube was an almost immediate success. And some of that success is owed to the young people who created content for the site long before they could make money doing it. But even some of the earliest amateur filmmakers on YouTube didn’t put their content there themselves.

David Lehre, a 10th grader from Michigan, uploaded his short film “MySpace: The Movie” to his own website on January 28, 2005. Someone he didn’t know downloaded the video and uploaded it to YouTube just a few days later, where it racked up six million views in just a few weeks. By the end of February, Lehre uploaded it himself. (As of this writing, the “official” video has just over one million views.) On February 26, 2005, a story from the Associated Press ran in newspapers around the country, explaining this new platform and Lehre’s shot to semi-celebrity. The AP story explained that Lehre’s video was being played on Current TV (a failed liberal cable TV channel started by Al Gore) and that Lehre had gotten an offer to develop something at MTV’s college-targeted channel, MTVU. The point seemed to be that anyone could make it big in an age of abundant DIY video.

There were actually a number of different video-sharing sites in 2005, including Clipshack, VSocial, Grouper, Metacafe, Revver, and OurMedia. Even Vimeo, launched in November of 2004, was already on the scene when YouTube arrived. But YouTube stole the show in 2005 and Mashable hailed the “Flickr of video” as the likely winner.

From Mashable on December 26, 2005:

YouTube is way ahead of many of these [other] services - YouTube videos are appearing on blogs and websites all over the place. OurMedia is also excellent, but it’s a non-profit and I’m more interested in startups right now. I’m also a fan of Grouper - it’s definitely one to watch.

Now correct me if I’m wrong, but the only video sharing service with a clear business model right now is Revver - they’re putting ads in videos and splitting the revenue with the content creator. Even this seems like a difficult thing to pull off - can they earn enough from the ads to pay for their bandwidth and reward the content creators? I’m not sure - but I’m keen to find out.