History of YouTube: a timeline

what is the company that owns youtube

The new program also prioritizes search and said it will assign videos a “search value” based on how aligned they are with trending search topics. That search value will help determine a creator’s payout, in addition to other factors like engagement. One of the employees said YouTube Music gives users a choice on how to consume podcasts. They can listen to audio-only or watch it in video format — and they can go back and forth between the two if the episode is downloaded with YouTube Premium.

History of YouTube: a timeline

It reorganized in 2015 and created the holding foreign exchange rates company named Alphabet. The parent holds Google, its largest subsidiary, and several other companies. Some of these companies are subsidiaries of Google, while others are separately owned by Alphabet. Alphabet was founded as a search engine company in 1998 under the name Google Inc.

what is the company that owns youtube

A major portion of Alphabet’s Class A and Class C shares held by major institutional investors like Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street is due to their extensive ETF offerings. ETFs, index funds, and low-fee passive investing have become popular with investors who see them as a way to avoid high fees from managed funds that, in most cases, don’t even beat the market. These firms manage ETFs that track major indexes such as the S&P 500 and Nasdaq-100, which include Alphabet as a significant component due to its large market capitalization and influence in the technology sector.

YouTube was founded in 2005 by three former PayPal employees who believed ordinary people would enjoy sharing their homemade videos online. By the summer of 2006, YouTube was already offering more than 100 million videos per day. Both technical problems that accompany rapid growth and lack of commercial success prompted YouTube to begin searching for a buyer. As such, the platform offers a wide variety of user-generated and corporate media videos. However, after the infamous Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson Super Bowl halftime show incident, the three creators were how to become a web development consultant trying to find that video on the internet, but couldn’t find videos of it on the internet.

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Private equity firm Hellman & Friedman paid $1.1 billion in a “take-private” transaction to become majority owners of the company in 2005. The crowd-sourced mobile traffic advisory device and navigation service was acquired five years later by Google, whose own Google Maps app was already seven years old by that time. Acquiring Waze eliminated competition; Google also saw Waze’s traffic-updating features as novel enhancements to Google Maps. The deal closed after antitrust regulators in the European Union approved the acquisition with conditions directed at protecting users’ health data and preserving competition in the sector for wearable tech. Google stressed that the acquisition is about devices rather than data and made commitments that user data would not be used for Google ads. The YouTube headquarters is a large campus with several buildings.

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In addition, YouTube was forced to allocate more financial resources for potential litigation, as many media companies discovered that some of 12 best crypto trading bot platforms to invest with the videos uploaded to YouTube contained copyrighted material. With limited success in commercializing its Web site or containing its growing costs, YouTube began looking for a buyer. Shortly after the site opened on a limited (“beta”) basis in May 2005, it was attracting some 30,000 visitors per day. By the time YouTube was officially launched on December 15, 2005, it was serving more than two million video views each day. By January 2006 that number had increased to more than 25 million views.

  1. Google’s acquisition of YouTube in late 2006 gave it a new, powerful video platform.
  2. Google agreed to the price, and YouTube said it was ready to do the deal.
  3. And it does this in a way that is effective, easy-to-use, reliable, friendly and relatable.

This synergy between YouTube’s creative potential and Google’s technological and advertising prowess demonstrated how embracing innovation and strategic collaborations can reshape industries. The integration of YouTube into Google’s ecosystem also meant that advertisers had a new, powerful channel to reach potential customers. This synergy wasn’t just beneficial for big brands but also for small players—the kind of entrepreneurs and creators who are always on your radar. With tools like Google AdSense, creators could now monetize their content more efficiently, turning passion projects into profitable ventures. For you, as an online business maven, there are a few key takeaways.