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In YouTubes early days, the odds seemed good that the platform would be destroyednot by a competitor, but by its own popularity. How could any young video startup ever cover the cost of streaming so much content across the internet? Or avoid the fate of Napster, another media-sharing startup of the era that was sued out of business for rampant copyright infringement? Even being acquired by Google in 2006 posed a risk: YouTube could have been mismanaged into irrelevance, as often happens after tech giants acquire shiny new toys. But over its first 20 years, YouTube didnt just surviveit revolutionized media, redefining what TV could be. By letting anyone upload video for free, it empowered a new generation of creators to cater to every imaginable audience and attract fan bases in the millions. It taught marketers to appreciate the value of reaching these viewers, and it used technology to give rights holders control over their content. The platform conquered PCs and then smartphones and was eventually available on nearly every new TV set. Today, with 2 billion logged-in users a month, YouTube is watched more than any traditional TV outlet. According to Nielsen, the company has grown its total viewers by nearly 50% since December 2023, bounding past Paramount, NBCUniversal, and Disney to take the top spot among media companies. Its now the U.S.s most-watched video provider, not just among streamers but cable and broadcast TV channels, too. Its 2024 ad revenue was $36.15 billion, a figure that doesnt include subscription revenue from its YouTube Premium and YouTube TV businesses. YouTubes story is still unfolding, and new twistssuch as the arrival of generative AIhave yet to play out. But to understand where business, tech, and culture are heading, there may be no smarter place to look than YouTubes past. We talked to dozens of employees, creators, and other eyewitnesses to tell the story of where YouTube has been, and where its going. (Their comments have been edited for length and clarity.) In this articlethe first chapter of an oral history Fast Company will be publishing in five partssome of those interview subjects recall key moments in YouTubes earliest days, from tiny startup to category-defining phenomenon. Its story, like so many others, began at PayPal. The payments startups early employees, whod be known as the PayPal mafia, began to infiltrate the tech industry and start new companies, particularly after PayPal went public in 2002 and was acquired by eBay soon after. Steve Chen, cofounderwith Chad Hurley and Jawed Karimof YouTube: The three of us and most of the early YouTube hires, that original core team, all came from PayPal. We had had at least three or four years of experience working together. Chad, I think, I met on the first day that I landed in Silicon Valley.Roelof Botha, former PayPal CFO and partner at Sequoia Capital, YouTubes first investor: PayPal was a bit of a cauldron of an experience. We had a very small team in the office, next to the Palo Alto dump. I remember being there on weekends and seeing Steve standing outside smoking, because he was still a smoker back then. I worked with Jawed on a project in 2000. While Chen, Hurley, and Karim hatched plans for a video-sharing startup in early 2005, an entire field of such services was sprouting up, including Google Video, Revver, Veoh, and Vimeo. All leveraged Macromedias Flash software, which shipped with most web browsers and had simplified the formerly gnarly process of streaming video over the internet. In Chen, Hurley, and Karims initial conception, their service would focus on letting people upload videos of themselves to find dates. Casey Neistat, filmmaker whose 2003 video iPods Dirty Secret had been a rare pre-YouTube viral phenomenon: When I first started making movies in the very early 2000s with my older brother, there was no appropriate venue for the kind of videos that we made. Felicia Day, actress, singer, writer, and YouTuber: Its so strange to think that people didnt watch videos online. I remember seeing the lightsaber kid, and thats pretty much it. Mike Downey, senior product manager, Flash: In the early days of Flash, the player was bundled with Netscape Navigator. Microsoft then knew they needed to bundle Flash with Internet Explorer. Because IE couldnt succeed if it didnt have everything Netscape had.John Harding, Google software engineer (2005-2007); YouTube engineering manager, director, VP (2007-present): Before [Flash], you needed either desktop software or complicated browser plug-ins, and it didnt work for half of the people half of the time. Downey: The alternative was RealPlayer or Windows Media Player, or a couple of others. You were taken out of the web and into the RealPlayer experience or the Windows Media Player experience, and it wasn’t a seamless thing.Billy Biggs, Google/YouTube software engineer (2006-present): Flash video is what made this all possible. Suddenly the internet had video as a thing. Harding: We did some pretty cool things with Google Video that we hadn’t seen other people do. Like, we let you jump all the way to the end or any point within a video, which was something that Flash didn’t actually support.Dmitry Shapiro, founder and CEO, Veoh: I started pitching Veoh to investors in mid-January of 2005. And the first person that I pitched [to] was a guy named Roelof Botha at Sequoia. Im not suggesting that Roelof took my idea and gave it to Chad and Steve. But the history shows that we were there at a similar time.Chen: We started development in February of 2005. Even during that phase, we were not sure whether Macromedia Flash would be sufficient.Botha: I was at a gathering of former PayPal people in San Francisco, and somebody mentioned, Hey, you should check out what Jawed and Chad and Steve are working on. And so I went home and typed in the URL and discovered YouTube. They were still in Chads garage in Menlo Park at the time, the three of them. I reached out, and we started to chat about the business.Chen: When we originally released it, we thought that it was going to be a dating site. After a week passed by and zero videos were uploaded, we thought, Okay, before we give up, why dont we just open it all up and let the users decide what they want to upload? It wasnt that we saw a spike in traffic right away, but we started seeing sprinkles of content come in. Me at the Zoo April 2005 In the first-ever YouTube video, the platforms cofounder Jawed Karim informs us that elephants have really, really, really long trunks, and thats cool. Its a start Shapiro: Veoh believed that it was going to be extraordinarily expensive to host and stream video from our servers, and therefore we needed to build a peer-to-peer network to dissipate the costs. Chad and Steve didn’t try to solve the problem. They got to market fast and became a hit. As the service gained traction with creators, there was more stuff to watch. As more people watched, there was more incentive for creators to post. This virtuous circle propelled growth. Chris Maxcy, YouTube VP of business development (2005-2013): When I started, my hypothesis was, this is a young company thats going to have to work with the AOLs of the world, the Yahoos of the world, because its going to be all about getting traffic. That premise quickly changed. Evolution of Dance April 2006 In under eight minutes, Judson Laipply prances his way through decades of American pop music, from Chubby Checker to Eminem. Winningly energetic and goofy, this was the most-watched YouTube video of all time as late as October 2009. Chen: We started seeing a spike in activity through the social networking sites out there. At the time, MySpace was the biggest one, and they allowed you to take that same embed code that you see on YouTube today and embed it into your MySpace updates. Overnight, that video could get hundreds of thousands of other people putting it into their own profiles and sharing it with their entire network. Rhett McLaughlin, cocreator and cohost (with Link Neal) of Good Mythical Morning: People started asking us, Why don’t you have a YouTube channel? And we said, We don’t have one because YouTube channels are for people who don’t have websites. We didn’t understand anything about what was about to unfold. Ian Hecox, cocreator (with his high school friend Anthony Padilla) of the comedy duo Smosh, which got its start lip-synching TV theme songs: We started making these videos out of sheer boredom. And then, when we found out about YouTube, one of our main drivers [to post videos there] was just free hosting. Because every time somebody watched a video through our website or on MySpace, we would have to pay for that bandwidth. Justine iJustine Ezarik, YouTuber, whose first YouTube video was test footage showing her microwaving and eating oatmeal: I was posting videos everywhereMySpace, Yahoo, Revver. There were just a bunch of places that were hosting videos. I started posting to YouTube mostly just to store the videos. Botha: Part of what YouTube did was they had the comment section. They were able to cultivate a community. Anthony Padilla, cofounder, Smosh: You could see the audience feedback immediately. You could refresh the page and see the views go up immediately. Seeing those numbers increase when we made something better helped us refine what we made so we could continue doing what we liked. Ezarik: I was like, Oh, this is so cool. Theres a whole community of people here. So I started posting for [the YouTube] audience, and then finding other people who were making videos. And thats where it got interesting. There werent many people doing it. Hecox: What initially attracted people to our content was the accessibility of it and the relatability of it. Any kid that ever had a camera could relate to what we were doing. They’re like, I also have access to a camera and I make silly skits with my friends. Mia Quagliarello, YouTube senior product marketing manager, content and community (2006-2011): Skateboarding dogs was the [term people used to] be derogatory about the kind of content that was there. There was a lot more content than skateboarding dogs. Lonelygirl15 June 2006 Bree, a 16-year-old who broadcasts from her bedroom, becomes YouTubes most popular creator. It turns out shes fictional, and her videos develop into a serialized science-fiction story. Chen: A video of [soccer star] Ronaldinho juggling a ball off a goalpost was one of the first videos in 2005 that really took off. Botha: We reached out to the person who uploaded it. It turned out to be one of the marketing people at Nike. Chad, Steve, and I flew up to Oregon to meet them. To me, it was a very interesting window into how brands would use this platform, and it wouldnt just be Americas Funniest Home Videos done on the internet. In August 2006, YouTube hit the Comscore Media Metrix top-50 ranking of the largest web properties. Still wincing from their encounters with Napster and other file-sharing services widely used for piracy, media companies eyed the new phenom warily, though some chose to engage with it. Unauthorized sharing of copyrighted content abounded. Jack Flanagan, EVP, Comscore (2002-2010): When those reports came out, people would jump into them immediately just to see how they ranked. The fact that it was the first time that YouTube broke into the top 50 was just huge accomplishment. Michael Fricklas, general counsel, Viacom (2000-2017): It had started to become pretty well known in the movie and television industry that there was this new pirate site. Maxcy: I remember talking with a very, very, very large studio down in L.A. This one particular individual said, We love YouTube. We think this is really going to help our business, particularly from a promotional standpoint. But when I leave this room, I’m going to have to say, loudly in the hall, that we’re going to reserve the right to sue you. Chen: Even Lady Gaga playing in the background is technically copyrighted content if its more than a few seconds. We were very aware of the Napster issues. Zahavah Levine, YouTube general counsel, chief counsel (2006-2011): Many users were uploading videos of themselves, either alone or with friends, singing songs or dancing to music playing in the background, or maybe of their kid dancing in their living room to music playing in their house. Hecox: One of our first videos, the Pokémon theme song music video, quickly became the most viewed video on YouTube. It stayed there for about a year and a half before it was removed for copyright infringement. That was a catalyst for us to push ourselves into original content that didn’t have copyrighted content, because we didn’t want to see our videos removed. Maxcy: Warner Music Group was our first label partner. That really helped us build credibility with some of the other larger labels. Levine: I still remember sending an email to our main contact at WMG proposing that instead of removing all the user-uploaded videos identified as containing WMG recordings, we instead monetize them with ads and share the money with WMG. To our great surprise and joy, Warner agreed. Lyor Cohen, Warner Music Group CEO of recorded music (2004-2012); YouTube and Google global head of music (2016-present): [WMG chairman and CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr.] had a lot to do with it. He was quite receptive to experimenting and pushing the boundaries. We saw an opportunity to push the accelerator rather than pump the brakes. Levine: Until that moment, music companies had always negotiated and approved the right to use a piece of music in a video on a song-by-song and a use-by-use basis. This was the first time ever that a music company granted blanket sync rights for an entire catalog of compositions to be used in unknown video content. A historic firstand a huge milestone. Additional reporting by María José Gutiérrez Chávez, Yasmin Gagne, and Steven Melendez
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E-Commerce
The entrepreneur Sara Mauskopf has a big voice on X but not in real life. Tens of thousands of people follow her account, where she goes by @sm. Outside social media, she is an introvert who prefers to stay in with her husband and three kids, only attending industry happy hours when she feels its critical for her business. Allow me to bust the myth, which I have heard repeated by peers and colleagues throughout my working life. The myth? To build a following as a storyteller, you have to be self-centered, self-promoting, or extroverted. In reality, its often the opposite. It might seem counterintuitive, but Mauskopf gravitates to social media because she doesnt crave the spotlight in her personal life. Self-effacing, witty introverts like Mauskopf are far more commonly found on the internet than you might think. In truth, you can be thoughtful and low-key yet still find success as a storyteller. Many of the people I interviewed who had the largest followings online were also the humblest. I sum up people like Mauskopf with the term quiet influencer. These are people who arent trying to draw attention to themselves but can find a following online because of their ability to listen and absorb information. When they do share, its to educate, inform, or entertain others, not to build up their egos. Often, they follow the golden ratio of social posts: the 9:1 rule. I came up with this formula early in my career, when I was starting out on social media. I havent changed it in over a decade, simply because it works, and I share it with companies I advise daily. So here goes: For every one braggy post related to an accomplishment, milestone, or achievement, share nine that are useful contributions. Think of the contributionsthings that are interesting, valuable, entertainingas earning the brags. Sometimes it is helpful to share something positive that happened on a personal or professional levelI totally understand that but this lets you do it without it coming off as self-absorbed or generic. Companies are guilty of this toohave you ever scrolled a CEOs LinkedIn profile and viewed nothing but updates about funding milestones, customer wins, and key hires? These are important to share every once in a while, for the purposes of company morale and external validation, but a big opportunity for contribution content has been missed. If theres anything to remember, its this: To be a successful storyteller, both online and offline, its important to think about what the audience wants and needs. Many of us, as we move through our lives, welcome helpful information that we wouldnt get elsewhereinformation that helps us do our jobs better, learn something new, or feel less alone with the challenges we face. If you can meet that need, youll be a much more engaging storyteller. Contributions in this vein might include: A hilarious personal anecdote that will make someone laugh when they need a little bit of levity in their day An insight about what is really going on in the news beyond the headlinessomething people in the industry would find helpful A piece of analysis that explains a complicated topic in an accessible way or provides a step-by-step for how to accomplish something that others find challenging If you are sharing something self-promotional, it can help to provide context around why the milestone means so much to you. One example: When the Joe Biden administration highlighted Kaitlin Christine, a CEO in my network, for her companys work in breast cancer detection, I helped her share the news with her community. She initially wrote that it was an important milestone, and she described how honored she was without going into much detail. Because I knew a little about her story, I prompted her to share a little bit about how she felt in the moment when the White House reached out and what it meant to her. Christines company, Gabbi, builds breast cancer risk detection software. She started it after losing her mother to the disease at a young age. After getting screened herself, Christine ended up getting a double mastectomy given her profile (genetics, family history, and so forth). So, to hear from the Biden administration felt like her lifes goals were being realized and her mother would have been truly proud. Once reframed to talk about how personal the experience was for her, her post hit a nerve with her following. The beauty of reframing content in this way is that even something promotional, like an important new milestone or new hire, can become a useful contribution and/or a moment to truly connect with an extended network. That turns the viewer from a passive liker into a true believer or ally. Likes become comments and reshares and, more importantly, offers of support. I genuinely appreciate when CEOs talk about not just the great things theyve accomplished in their roles and daily activities but how they got there. Some people refer to this trend as building in the open. Imagine a scenario where a CEO doesnt just post something bland on LinkedIn about the stellar new chief technology officer they just hired. How about sharing instead how they found this amazing candidate? What tools did they use? Did they retain a recruiterand if so, who? What kinds of interview questions did they produce to assess each candidates technical prowess? What geographies did they focus on? Perhaps this information could even be viewable to anyone via an open document like Google Docs or Notion. Likewise, rather than announcing a venture capital funding round, a leadership team could talk instead about how they were able to raise money in a difficult funding environment. Authenticity works because it shows vulnerability or provides others with a potential lesson they can use in their own professional pursuits. If you follow the 9:1 golden ratio, no one will begrudge you the odd self-promotional post that highlights your fantastic accomplishments. Those are important to share occasionally, because the industry may want to know what youre up to. The important thing is to use your voice to give back to your community most of the time. If you are a resource to others, they will follow you, and you will build influence. Excerpted from The Storytellers Advantage: How Powerful Narratives Make Businesses Thrive. Copyright 2025 by Christina Farr. Available from Basic Venture, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
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E-Commerce
Where you live determines a lotespecially if you’re a woman. From physical and mental well-being to unemployment rates to median income, key components of life satisfaction in the U.S. vary drastically based on location. And given that the pay gap also worsens for women, in particular, as they age, the city they call home can be a huge factor in determining earnings and quality of life later on. A new WalletHub study ranked 182 cities in the U.S. to find out which ones are best for women. The rankings are based on two factors: women’s economic and social well-being, which includes median earnings, unemployment rate, and job security; and women’s healthcare and safety, which looks at access to abortion, the quality of women’s hospitals, and suicide rates. The top-ranked cities have higher annual wages when adjusting for cost of living; good healthcare; and low rates of poverty for women. The lowest-ranked cities have larger gaps in womens healthcare and fewer opportunities for well-paying jobs. First on the list is Columbia, Maryland, which has the highest median wage for women at $61,778 and a relatively low poverty rate of 8.2% (the eighth lowest in the U.S.). The unemployment rate for women is just over 4% and nearly a quarter (23%) of businesses are owned by women. While many cities in the study are struggling with women’s healthcare gaps, Columbia has the 10th-best life expectancy for birthing women in the U.S. Seattle, which ranked second among the cities studied, has the seventh-highest percentage of women-owned businesses, and just 11% of women live below the poverty line. The median salary is $47,792 and only 3.5% of women are uninsured. The city has the 11th-highest life expectancy at birth for women, and crimes against women and suicide rates are comparatively low. Overland Park, Kansas, is the third-best city for women. While its ranking for healthcare and safety was 58 out of 182, it scored second on economic and social well-being. With a strong economy, only 3.6% of women are unemployed in Overland Park, and it has the second-highest median income for women. On the other end of the spectrum, a number of cities in the American South ranked poorly. Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Montgomery, Alabama; Gulfport, Mississippi; and Fort Smith, Arkansas, are all in the bottom 10. Ranking worst of all is Jackson, Mississippi, at 176 out of 182 for economic and social well-being and 175 for womens healthcare and safety. Analysts explained in their report that local policies are massively important in terms of whether women are able to thrive in a certain city. “Government officials need to look at how dismantling of DEI programs will greatly impact gender equity in the workforce and including access to institutional resources (STEM training, for example),” commented Cecilia Rio, an associate professor at Towson University in Maryland. “White women, in particular, benefited a great deal from the implementation of affirmative action in the past in order to open up professional and other traditional male occupations. Rio added, “It is ironic, for example, to hear Trumps press secretary complain about wokeness when the very policies that came from the social movements of the 60s and 70s knocked down the doors of discrimination and stubborn glass ceilings that kept women out of such prestigious careers to begin with.” Find the full list of best and worst cities for women here.
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E-Commerce
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