US-born video platform YouTube was founded in February 2005 by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim – all former PayPal employees.
The company was acquired by Google in October 2006 for $1.65 billion in a stock-for-stock transaction.
At the time of the company’s acquisition by Google – a year and a half after its launch, YouTube was delivering more than 100 million video views every day with 65,000 new videos uploaded daily.
As of today, YouTube reports that over 2 billion logged-in users visit the platform each month. YouTube also reports that its users watch 1 billion hours of video every day and generate billions of views.
Local versions of YouTube have been launched in more than 100 countries.
YouTube has been led by CEO Susan Wojcicki since 2014.
Revenues
According to parent Alphabet’s Q3 2020 fiscal filings, YouTube generated $5.04bn from ads in the three months to end of September 2020.
That was up by over $1.2bn on the $3.80bn that YouTube generated from ads in the same quarter of 2019.Music Business Worldwide