YouTube offered $20 per video and nobody uploaded. A year and a half later, 65,000 videos a day arrived for free

In 2007, YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim described the site’s beginnings at a commencement ceremony at the University of Illinois. At first it was a dating site where people found partners through video, under the slogan “Tune in, Hook up.” To gather uploads, the founders placed Craigslist ads in Las Vegas and Los Angeles offering women $20 to upload a video. Not one person responded.

Even at $20, not a single video came in. A year and a half later, in the summer of 2006, YouTube was receiving more than 65,000 videos a day without paying anyone.

The upload mechanism was the same. What changed was what people were allowed to upload. What follows traces that year and a half through numbers. Companies bought by listed firms fall outside this site’s criteria for cases, so only the period from founding to sale is covered, as a column.

From the domain in February 2005 to the completed acquisition in November 2006

Only the daily views and uploads also appear, with the same values, in buyer Google’s press release. The rest comes from an encyclopedia compiling the record and from an article reporting the co-founder’s speech.

What $20 could not buy arrived for free

When YouTube started as a dating site, what it wanted were videos of people filming themselves. Film yourself for strangers and put it online. Even with $20 on offer, nobody would upload on those terms.

The videos that arrived at 65,000 a day a year and a half later were not dating videos. According to the encyclopedia’s account, the founders dropped the dating angle after failing to find footage of the Super Bowl halftime incident online. There was traction in the gap, in footage people wanted to see that nobody had posted. The first video, “Me at the zoo,” is just Karim standing at a zoo.

What the desk wants to state plainly is that what changed was not the reward but the range of what could be uploaded. The uploads YouTube tried to buy at $20 were uploads that exposed the uploader, and no price drew them out. The moment the range widened to “anything,” uploads became something that needed no price. With the same upload feature, the relationship between who pays and who gets paid flipped.

An open shelf brought others’ copyrighted work along with volume

In exchange for widening the range, YouTube took on a different problem. Videos that did not belong to the people uploading them began to mix in. In the encyclopedia’s account, YouTube signed copyright agreements with three media companies before the sale, and growing copyright problems along with weak monetization are cited as factors that led to selling to Google.

Supporting 100 million daily views also meant adding new equipment and wider connections without pause. On a shelf where anyone could place anything, volume and the cost and responsibility that came with it grew at the same speed.

A 68-person company was valued at $1.65B

On October 9, 2006, Google announced the acquisition for $1.65B in stock. The press release says YouTube had more than 100 million video views and 65,000 new uploads a day. The deal closed on November 13, and the 68 employees were to continue YouTube inside Google.

From the domain going live to the announcement took about one year and eight months. The investment recorded in the encyclopedia is Sequoia’s $3.5M plus a further $8M marked as failed verification. Against the outside capital, the sale price is more than two orders of magnitude larger. What produced that gap, though, was not videos YouTube made itself but videos users left there for free.

Records from the small end of the same shelf

How much individuals earn on the YouTube shelf is counted in the column setting the top and bottom of the YouTube shelf side by side. Even for the listed company on the top shelf, streaming itself was under 20% of revenue.

The three founders came from PayPal. How that PayPal sold to eBay for $1.5B in 2002 is in the column on Elon Musk’s first company and its sale prices. The list setting YouTube beside other legendary companies is in the column tracing 22 founding legends to their sources.

What could be confirmed

The limits need stating. The dating-site start and the $20 offer come from a 2015 article reporting what a co-founder said in a 2007 speech, and the zero responses rest on his own words. The investment amounts come from the encyclopedia’s compilation, and the April 2006 $8M carries a failed-verification note. The viewer growth figures come from the same compilation, and only the summer 2006 views and uploads match Google’s disclosure.

From uploads that would not come even for pay to uploads that came without it

Follow YouTube’s founding years through numbers and what remains is a price that flipped in a year and a half. At first it could not gather videos even at $20 apiece, and a year and a half later 65,000 a day arrived for free. In between, the upload mechanism did not change.

What changed was the range of what could be uploaded. That range brought volume, and with it others’ copyrighted work and the cost of distributing it all. The $1.65B sale reads as the arrival of a buyer that could take on all of it at once. The legend tells the failed dating site as a funny story, but what the documents keep is the record of how much a shelf with a widened range had to carry in a year and a half.