YouTube

Founded by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim, YouTube.com revolutionized the way people used the internet. Their video sharing website gave users a richer web experience. It also shifted the balance of importance from text to multi-media content. Although the site is now owned by Google, the foundations laid down by its Chen, Hurley and Karim are still very prevalent today.

The three founders of YouTube were original employees of PayPal, the global electronic payment processor. Chen and Hurley conceptualized the company in the early part of 2005 with Karim helping in its development. The domain name was registered in February 2005, with the website being continually developed and improved over the next few months.

The first video was uploaded on April, 2005 with beta testing beginning the following month. YouTube.com was officially launched in November 2005 and it grew extremely quickly. Its popularity spread from city to city, then from country to country.  In less than a year, the site was receiving 100 million viewers a day. Spotting huge potential in the site, Google announced its acquisition of the site 2006, for a jaw dropping $1.65 billion.

Although YouTube.com is ranked as the third most visited website after Google and Facebook, monetizing the site initially proved challenging, particularly due to encountering many legal problems as a result of users uploading copyrighted content. These issues have since been resolved. By May 2010, more than 14 billion videos had been viewed on the site.

The success of YouTube.com is one of the biggest in Internet history. In just over a year, the founders were able to create $1.65 billion worth of value from not just their own creativity, but that of the YouTube community. Their success is certain to inspire the next generation of would-be Internet entrepreneurs.