YouTube
YouTube is an American online video sharing platform owned by Google and was founded on February 14, 2005 by Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen, who were former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in San Bruno, California, it is the second-most-visited website in the world, after Google itself and in January 2024, YouTube had more than 2.7 billion monthly active users, who collectively watched more than one billion hours of videos every day. As of May 2019, videos were being uploaded to the platform at a rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute, and as of mid-2024, there were approximately 14.8 billion videos in total.
On November 13, 2006, YouTube was purchased by Google for US$1.65 billion (equivalent to $2.39 billion in 2024). Google expanded YouTube's business model from generating revenue through advertisements alone to offering paid content such as movies and exclusive content explicitly produced for YouTube.