04 July,2010 10:42 AM IST | | Lindsay Pereira
Was YouTube born after a dinner party? That's the official story. Apparently, three guys named Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim decided to put it together because they couldn't figure out a way to share video footage taken at the party in question.
Irrespective of whether or not that story is apocryphal -- and it does sound suspiciously like the creation of some poor marketing grad with questionable skills -- it's hard for people born in the '90s to consider a world without the video-sharing juggernaut we now know so well.
The domain name went live on Valentine's Day, incidentally, and a mere five years ago at that. The first video uploaded two months later depicted Karim at a zoo in California. It was titled, rather succinctly, 'Me At The Zoo.' Since that humble effort, YouTube has grown to serve approximately 24 hours of new video content every minute.
How do they do it? Monetise, I mean. Considering the daily cost of operations must now put the GDP of a few small countries to shame, it's still interesting to try and figure out how the Google-owned behemoth intends to further milk its massive amount of content.
Thanks to the impressive mileage it offers everyone, from amateur ventriloquists to the execrable Justin Bieber, no one's going to beat it at its game anytime soon. YouTube now wields enormous cultural -- and, to a lesser extent, political -- influence. That this influence continues to hugely benefit its parent company, still makes it valuable, but that won't stop other video-sharing sites from asking themselves: 'If they can't, how can we?' It's also interesting to try and figure out how it aims to offer users a better experience than, say, potential rivals like Vimeo (.com) or Hulu (.com).
Maybe money isn't the point though. Maybe every once in a while, we ought to put aside revenue models and simply celebrate a product for what it helps us do: in this instance, capture our lives in real time, preserving a sense of who we are so our great grandchildren can one day smile in recognition.
u00a0-- Lindsay Pereira is Editor, MiD DAY Online
twitter.com/ lindsay pereira
