YouTube was founded by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Kim, who were all early employees of PayPal.
The inspiration for the site came when Karim could not find videos online of Janet Jackson’s infamous Super Bowl halftime show in 2004 or the Indian Ocean tsunami that same year. This led to the idea of a video sharing site.
YouTube went live in May 2005 with a public beta test and was officially launched in November 2005. 
By July 2006, 65,000 new videos were being uploaded each day and the site was receiving 1 million video views per day.
In October 2006 Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock.
Today YouTube displays a variety of user-generated content such as TV shows, video clips, music videos, video blogs, and educational videos. Most of the videos are uploaded by individuals but media corporations such as CBS, BBC, Vevo, and Hulu offer some of their material on YouTube.
YouTube is available in over 60 languages and is the clear leader in online video sharing with 2 billion video views each day.
In February 2020, YouTube stated that it paid various music companies more than $3 billion in royalties in 2019.
Also in 2020, YouTube launched a third-party video subscription service in order to compete with Amazon and Apple.
YouTube maintains a corporate office in San Mateo, California.
