ShareThisWas there life before YouTube?
Why yes, and we lived it only four years ago. But given the events of the past week, when YouTube's digital fingerprints were all over the news, it's hard to imagine.
Tens of millions of people have watched Susan Boyle, the Scottish singing sensation on "Britain's Got Talent." The president of Domino's Pizza posted a YouTube video apologizing for a "disgusting" prank video put up by two former employees. Music critics across the country weighed in on the debut of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. And an anonymous person from Pittsburg got media attention for doing good deeds in Chicago.
All because of a site that posted its first video just four years ago Thursday.
YouTube was founded by three former employees of PayPal, including Chad Hurley, a graduate of Indiana University of Pennsylvania. They cashed in three years ago when Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock.
The site initially was envisioned as a place for people to share content like home movies and vacation videos with family and friends. "They wanted to create a destination where people could sit down and easily share clips with each other," said company spokesman Chris Dale.
And while many users still do use the site that way, YouTube has quickly become the Internet's go-to platform for music videos and all manner of corporate-produced and homemade video clips, many of them heartwarming, hilarious or simply bizarre.
Many Web surfers first became familiar with YouTube in early 2006, with the viral popularity of "Lazy Sunday," a nerdy rap video that ran on "Saturday Night Live" in December 2005.
It was the very first true YouTube sensation: About 5 million people watched the video before NBC demanded that YouTube remove it, hoping instead that viewers would watch it on iTunes or NBC.com.
Since then, YouTube's greatest hits have come from both old-fashioned home movies (often involving babies, including "Charlie bit my finger," with 92 million views, and "Hahaha," with 81 million) and from replays of content produced elsewhere, like Joaquin Phoenix's interview with David Letterman and a tearjerker clip from Animal Planet's "Christian the Lion" reunion documentary.
The all-time most viewed item on YouTube is the music video for Avril Lavigne's "Girlfriend," with 118 million views. "There's a huge overlap between people who enjoy Avril Lavigne and people who enjoy YouTube," said Dale. "In part that was serendipity, in part it was really feverish gung-ho fans."
Record companies were some of the first corporate entities to sign licensing agreements with YouTube, with Warner Brothers, Universal and Sony BMG all signing on in 2006.
For television and movies, the path has been significantly more complicated. Though CBS has some content available on YouTube, NBC puts its content on Hulu, a YouTube competitor owned by NBC's parent company, General Electric Co. Thus far, ABC keeps most of its content on ABC.com, though YouTube has some of its sports clips.
YouTube executives originally believed that the public didn't have much of an appetite for watching videos more than a few minutes long. But the company changed its mind, in part because of the huge demand for President Obama's 38-minute speech on race during his campaign last year.
Last week, YouTube announced that it had signed deals with several film studios to make movies available on the site.
And in the form of the YouTube symphony, which drew musicians from around the world for a concert at Carnegie Hall, the site is moving from just a platform to a content originator.
"A couple of guys with a dream pulled together and created a site that is brilliant in its simplicity -- all you want to do is watch clips," said Dale. "From there, it became this global phenomenon."
E-mail Anya Sostek at asostek(at)post-gazette.com.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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