In 2005, three PayPal employees thought it would be a great idea to start a website for video sharing. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim found themselves in between jobs, working out of a garage, and in credit card debt. Thus was the beginning of YouTube. Two years later, Google, Inc. acquired YouTube for 1.65 billion in Google’s stock.
Today, over 70 million videos are viewed daily on YouTube. With the investment of video recording devices and affordable video editing software, some YouTube submissions have resulted in record contracts, with their creators being featured on popular TV shows, such as Jay Leno and Carson Daly, and starring in commercials for popular brands, such as Dr. Pepper.
Large corporations, including Nike, Honda, Sony, Nokia, BMW, and Dove (just to name a few) have their own YouTube channels. Presidential candidates utilized YouTube to get their messages across.
Other video sharing websites have followed suit. Today there are more than three hundred video share sites on the Internet. Among these are Beet.TV (which actually came before YouTube), Veoh, Vimeo, Yahoo! Video, Blip.TV, Zippy Videos, Stupid Videos, GodTube, Metacafe, and Google Video.
What a great form of free universal advertisement!