YouTube is an American online video-sharing platform owned by Google. Users upload, watch and share videos, and they can pay for YouTube Premium to watch without ads. Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim and Steve Chen founded it on February 14, 2005. It is the second most visited website in the world after Google.
History of YouTube
Creator: Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim and Steve Chen, former PayPal employees. Year: 2005.
Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim and Steve Chen founded YouTube. They did so on February 14, 2005. All three had worked at PayPal. From November 2005 to April 2006, the company raised money. The money came from investors. Sequoia Capital and Artis Capital Management were the two largest investors.
YouTube was not the first video-sharing site. Vimeo was founded in November 2004. It stayed a side project of its developers from CollegeHumor. YouTube left beta on December 17, 2005. The name youtube.com led to a lawsuit in November 2006. The plaintiff was Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment. It owned utube.com.
On October 9, 2006, Google said it would buy YouTube. The price was $1.65 billion in Google stock. The deal was finalized on November 13, 2006. The deal raised interest in video-sharing sites.
After the purchase, YouTube grew beyond its website. It added mobile apps, network TV and games. It also added links with other platforms. Google added the AdSense program. Approved users earn money from ads on their videos.
In January 2024, YouTube had more than 2.7 billion monthly active users. Monthly active users are people who visit the platform in a month. Users watched more than one billion hours of video each day. As of May 2019, users uploaded about 500 hours of video each minute.2
Changelog and latest update
Google grew its business model beyond ads. It added paid offerings. Examples are movies and shows made for YouTube. YouTube Premium is a paid subscription. It lets people watch videos without ads. The service also offers mobile apps. It also offers games and links with other platforms.
In 2025, YouTube's ad revenue was $40.4 billion.3 Wikipedia lists these video categories. They include music videos, news, short films and feature films. They also include documentaries, movie trailers, live streams and vlogs.
The service has faced criticism. Critics name the spread of misinformation. They also name copyrighted material. Critics also cite routine privacy violations. They also cite excessive censorship. Wikipedia lists these criticisms. It gives a source for each one.
The YouTube Official Blog publishes posts. The posts are for viewers, creators and partners. Its News and Events listing shows a date for each post. Readers can follow changes over time. The blog also covers Made On YouTube 2026.
Latest update: YouTube TV setup for NFL Kickoff weekend, 2026-09-11
The YouTube Official Blog published a News and Events post on September 11, 2026. The post explains a YouTube TV setup. It is for NFL Kickoff weekend. This is the first dated post in the blog listing. The listing was checked for this entry.
Usage examples
A website can show a YouTube video in four ways. It can embed the video in an inline frame (iframe). It can load the IFrame Player application programming interface (API) for scripts. It can read video details from the YouTube Data API. It can also link to a watch page. The examples show each method. The video ID is the code in the video address. It follows the v parameter.
<iframe width="560" height="315"
src="https://www.youtube.com/
embed/VIDEO_ID"
title="Video title"
allowfullscreen></iframe>This iframe shows a public YouTube video inside a web page. The embed path holds the video ID. The width and height set the player size in pixels. The title attribute gives screen readers a name for the frame. Visitors who use assistive technology rely on that name.
function onYouTubeIframeAPIReady() {
new YT.Player("player", {
videoId: "VIDEO_ID"
});
}The YouTube IFrame Player API loads a player. It also lets scripts control that player. The function runs after the API script loads. The player id must match a div element on the page. The API replaces that div with the video player.
curl "https://www.googleapis.com/\
youtube/v3/videos?part=snippet\
&id=VIDEO_ID&key=API_KEY"This request asks the YouTube Data API for the snippet of one video. The snippet holds the title, the description and the channel name. The key value is a Google API key. The site owner creates that key. The API returns the result as JavaScript Object Notation (JSON).
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=VIDEO_ID">
Watch the video</a>This link opens the watch page for one video. The v parameter holds the video ID. A visitor who clicks the link leaves the site. The video opens on YouTube. There the player shows the full controls.
References
These sources are outside Websnoogie and were checked on 2026-10-12.
YouTube
Wikipedia
Encyclopedia entry on the video platform. It covers the 2005 founding, the 2006 purchase by Google, the user counts, the advertising revenue, the Premium subscription and the criticism, with a list of sources for each claim. The figures are cited to Wikipedia or to the company pages named above.
Official YouTube Blog
YouTube
The official blog for YouTube news, insights and creator stories. Its News and Events listing shows dates, and the September 11, 2026 post on YouTube TV setup for NFL Kickoff weekend used for the latest update is listed on the front page.
About YouTube
YouTube
The company page that explains what YouTube offers to viewers, creators, advertisers and businesses. It gives an overview of the service that a site owner can read before embedding a video from the platform. The page is maintained by YouTube.
YouTube Data API
Google for Developers
The developer documentation for the YouTube Data API version 3. It lists the resources, the request parameters, the quota limits and the authorization rules that apply to requests such as the video lookup in this entry. Developers use it to read video titles, descriptions and channel data.
Where should your video live?
Every business owner who makes videos has to decide where they will live. A YouTube channel brings in viewers, but a channel alone rarely tells a visitor what you sell. Your website should hold the page where a viewer decides to call you.
We help you choose that home for each clip. If your site runs on WordPress, we place it on our CMS hosting plan at $149 a year. A content management system (CMS) is software that lets you edit pages without writing code, and WordPress is the most common example. You can keep the video on the channel and still link to it from your own page.
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Call 402-813-4034 and describe the videos you plan to publish. We will tell you which home suits them and what it costs before any work starts. Bring your list of pages, and we will go through it with you. Or use the button below to begin.
