

Īccording to a story that has often been repeated in the media, Hurley and Chen developed the idea for YouTube during the early months of 2005, after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen's apartment in San Francisco. Hurley had studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. The trio were all early employees of PayPal, which left them enriched after the company was bought by eBay. YouTube was founded by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim.

It has been criticized for facilitating the spread of misinformation, copyright issues, violating its users' privacy, enabling censorship, and endangering child safety and wellbeing. YouTube has had a substantial social impact, influencing popular culture, internet trends, and creating multimillionaire celebrities. Since around 2015, established media corporations such as Disney, ViacomCBS, and WarnerMedia have created and expanded their corporate YouTube channels to advertise to a larger audience. This includes collaborations between YouTubers and company sponsors. Most content is generated by individuals. Video categories on YouTube include music videos, video clips, news, short films, feature films, documentaries, audio recordings, movie trailers, teasers, live streams, vlogs, and more. Since its purchase by Google, YouTube has expanded beyond the website into mobile apps, network television, and the ability to link with other services. It has since evolved from a small video streaming platform to a large service with reported revenues of $19.8 billion in 2020. YouTube and approved creators participate in Google's AdSense program, which generates more revenue for both parties. YouTube now offers paid content such as movies and exclusive content.

Google's ownership of YouTube has also changed its business model it no longer generates revenue from advertisements alone.

In October 2006, YouTube was bought by Google for $1.65 billion. As of May 2019, videos were being uploaded at a rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute. It is the second most visited website, with more than one billion monthly users who collectively watch more than one billion hours of videos each day. It was launched in February 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. YouTube is an American online video sharing and social media platform owned by Google. Python (core/API), C (through CPython), C++, Java (through Guice platform), Go, JavaScript (UI) Uploader holds copyright (standard license) Creative Commons can be selected.
