YouTube

The story: how YouTube rose

Three ex-PayPal employees registered youtube.com on Valentine's Day 2005; 'Me at the zoo', an 19-second clip of co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo, was the first upload. Within a year YouTube streamed 100 million videos a day — and had so thoroughly outrun its ability to manage copyright that Google, buying it for $1.65 billion in 2006, spent years afterwards turning a lawsuit magnet into a legitimate platform.

The Viacom litigation (settled 2014) forced the Content ID system, which became the foundation of the creator economy: rights holders monetise claimed videos instead of removing them, and creators get paid a revenue share. That single mechanism built an industry of millions of independent channels — the 'streaming' content Netflix cannot buy, because it is made by its audience.

YouTube's subscription era came late but at scale: YouTube Red (2015) became YouTube Premium; YouTube TV (2017) became the biggest live-TV streamer in the US with more than 8 million subscribers; Shorts (2020) answered TikTok; NFL Sunday Ticket (2023) put premium sport behind a YouTube subscription. In 2023 Google announced that Premium and Music together had passed 100 million subscribers (including trials).

Measured by watch time, YouTube is the largest streaming service on earth — and in Nielsen's Gauge it has been the number-one individual streaming platform in the US for years, ahead of Netflix. It is also the default TV app for a generation that watches YouTube on the biggest screen in the house.

Year-by-year milestones

1. 2005 — Founded February; 'Me at the zoo' uploaded in April.
2. 2006 — Google acquires YouTube for $1.65 billion.
3. 2007–14 — Viacom copyright war ends in Content ID and the creator economy.
4. 2015 — YouTube Red launches: the first subscription tier.
5. 2017 — YouTube TV launches: cable's replacement for live channels.
6. 2020 — YouTube Shorts launches against TikTok.
7. 2023 — 100 million Premium + Music subscribers announced; NFL Sunday Ticket arrives.
8. 2024–25 — Consistently the most-watched streaming platform in Nielsen's US Gauge.

Deep dives

Why YouTube is the biggest streamer nobody counts

Netflix counts paid memberships; Disney counts subscriptions; YouTube counts monthly logged-in users — more than 2.5 billion — a completely different unit. On watch time, YouTube has led Nielsen's US streaming rankings for years, and on revenue (more than $36 billion in ad revenue in 2024) it exceeds every streamer except Netflix.

The reason it rarely appears in 'streaming wars' coverage is its business model: it is an open platform that monetises attention, not a walled-garden subscription service. But for the viewer, and increasingly for advertisers and the TV industry, YouTube is simply the largest over-the-top video service in existence.

The creator economy's engine room

YouTube's partner program has paid out tens of billions of dollars to creators since 2007, and 'YouTuber' became a career before 'streaming original' did. This inventory of talent and content — tutorials, music, sport, commentary, podcasts — is what every subscription service now competes with for attention, and what media conglomerations cannot manufacture.

Where YouTube stands today

YouTube today is the background radiation of video: the default app on every screen, the second-most-visited website on earth, the biggest music service, a top-tier live-TV provider and the platform where the next generation of audiences lives. Every OTT platform's real competitor is not each other — it is YouTube's infinite free shelf.