Chapter 1

YouTube Marketing Power

On April 23, 2005, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim uploaded the first video onto their new video-sharing website—YouTube.com. The video was a brief clip titled Me at the Zoo. The goal of the new site was to make video sharing easy and to allow anyone to upload a video and share it with the world. To say they succeeded is an understatement.

The three former PayPal employees had been laboring away for months at their small office above Amici’s Pizzeria on East Third Avenue in San Mateo, California. San Mateo is just south of San Francisco in the famed Silicon Valley. By May 2005, they were ready to offer the public a beta test of their new site. Then they officially opened the doors to all visitors in ...

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