The earliest version of the YouTube website, archived in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, shows drop-down menus at the top of the page below the login where users can input data like their gender identity, the gender identity of their desired partner, and an age range. Unfortunately — or perhaps fortunately, considering what the platform would become — no one signed up for YouTube the video-based dating site, even when the founders offered $20 for people to try it.
Did you know that YouTube originally started as a dating site?
Answer: Well, it did.
Turns out, YouTube wasn’t originally intended to be the world’s favorite destination for viral videos. When Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim first started the platform, they made it a dating site. That explains why they registered the youtube.com domain name on Feb. 14 exactly 20 years ago.
The earliest version of the YouTube website, archived in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, shows drop-down menus at the top of the page below the login where users can input data like their gender identity, the gender identity of their desired partner, and an age range. Unfortunately — or perhaps fortunately, considering what the platform would become — no one signed up for YouTube the video-based dating site, even when the founders offered $20 for people to try it.
So they dropped the dating aspect, opening it up to allow anyone to upload any video. In December 2005, it officially launched as the video-sharing platform we know today. Google bought it for $1.65 billion in November 2006, and the rest is history.
The earliest version of the YouTube website, archived in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, shows drop-down menus at the top of the page below the login where users can input data like their gender identity, the gender identity of their desired partner, and an age range. Unfortunately — or perhaps fortunately, considering what the platform would become — no one signed up for YouTube the video-based dating site, even when the founders offered $20 for people to try it.
