Short answers, pulled from the story.
YouTube was founded on the 14th of February 2005, by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, all of whom were early employees at PayPal. Hurley had studied design at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, while Chen and Karim both studied computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock. The deal was announced on the 9th of October 2006, and finalized on the 13th of November 2006, less than two years after the platform launched.
The first YouTube video, titled "Me at the zoo," was uploaded on the 23rd of April 2005. It shows co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo and remains viewable on the platform.
YouTube retains 45% of advertising revenue from videos in the Partner Program, with 55% going to the uploader. To qualify, channels must meet a threshold of 4,000 hours of watch time within the prior 12 months and 1,000 subscribers, a standard set on the 16th of January 2018.
Content ID is YouTube's automated copyright detection system, developed from a 2007 trial called "Video Identification." It creates a fingerprint file for copyrighted audio and video, stores it in a database, and checks every newly uploaded video against that database. When a match is found, the rights holder can block the video, track its viewership, or monetize it with ads.
As of January 2024, YouTube had more than 2.7 billion monthly active users who collectively watched more than one billion hours of video every day. The platform holds approximately 14.8 billion videos in total, with more than 500 hours of new video being uploaded every minute.