YouTube, the Web's de-facto video service, is turning 10 this year. The site has become so indispensable that it feels like a basic part of the Internet itself rather than a service that lives on top of it. YouTube is just the place to put videos, and it's used by everyone from individuals to billion-dollar companies. It's obvious to say, but YouTube revolutionized Web video. It made video uploading and playback almost as easy as uploading a picture, handled all the bandwidth costs, and it allowed anyone to embed those videos onto other sites.

The scale of YouTube gets more breathtaking every year. It has a billion users in 61 languages, and 12 days of video are uploaded to the site every minute—that's almost 50 years of video every day. The site just continues growing. The number of hours watched on YouTube is up 50 percent from last year.

It's easy to forget YouTube almost didn't make it. Survival for the site was a near-constant battle in the early days. The company not only fought the bandwidth monster, but it faced an army of lawyers from various media companies that all wanted to shut the video service down. But thanks to cash backing from Google, the site was able to fend off the lawyers. And by staying at the forefront of Web and server technology, YouTube managed to serve videos to the entire Internet without being bankrupted by bandwidth bills.

Before YouTube (AKA the dark ages of Web video)

Before YouTube, Web video sucked. For a time there were three big competing video players: Real Player, Apple's QuickTime, and Microsoft's Windows Media Player. All three played different proprietary video formats, which usually meant a webmaster looking to reach a wide audience had to publish a video in three different formats. Sometimes the video files were also available in different sizes to support various connection speeds. This meant even more work for webmasters.

Playback meant either downloading the file and playing it in one of the Big 3 standalone players or using one of their wonky browser plugins that would (hopefully) embed the player right in a webpage. Sharing a video over e-mail usually meant attaching the actual file to the e-mail.

Eventually Flash improved things somewhat by putting a slightly more reliable embedded player in the website, but it was still up to the webmaster to host the video, find a Flash player, make all the code work, and debug any problems. And that's to say nothing of all the security issues that were introduced through Flash over the years.

YouTube is born: Growth and piracy are constant issues

YouTube the company was founded in February 2005 by three former PayPal employees. While the site wasn't public yet, the first video was uploaded to the site 10 years ago today (April 23). The video belonged to Jawed Karim, one of the three founders, and was titled "Me at the zoo."

The site went public in May and became an overnight hit. By 2006, it was the fastest growing site around with 20 million viewers a month. Seemingly the whole Internet tuned in to watch viral hits like the "Evolution of Dance," lonelygirl15, or Saturday Night Live's "Lazy Sunday."

That last video is a bit of a sore topic, indicative of a major early problem. YouTube was a haven for piracy. "Lazy Sunday" was copyrighted material from TV, illegally uploaded to YouTube by a user. And alongside the videos of amateur filmmakers and video bloggers, entire seasons of copyrighted TV shows, full movies, and music videos consistently landed on YouTube.

In February 2006, NBC was one of the first to cry foul, demanding removal of the "Lazy Sunday" clip after it had gained over a million views. Internet commenters at the time pointed out that the video introduced SNL to a new audience and got the show lots of attention. NBC didn't like someone else hosting its content, though. After the nastygram, YouTube pulled the video down. (These days it lives on Hulu or Yahoo.)

At this time, YouTube was too busy trying to keep up with growth to worry about its equally escalating piracy problem. In March 2006, though, a month after the NBC complaint, it finally started to fight back. New videos were limited to a 10-minute runtime, making it harder to upload full TV episodes and movies to the service. The community responded the way you'd expect: it broke pirated content into 10-minute chunks.

YouTube's next small breakthrough regarding copyright came in September 2006. It inked a deal with Warner Music Group to put the music label's entire catalog on YouTube in exchange for a cut of the advertising dollars. While it helped legitimize a small portion of YouTube's video selection, giving away a portion of the ad revenue also didn't help pay the bills. That was increasingly becoming a concern.

A deal with one company also did not cover millions of other copyright violations happening at YouTube. The RIAA had already targeted YouTube for unlicensed use of music, and just a few days earlier, Universal Music Group's CEO said of YouTube "these new businesses are copyright infringers and owe us tens of millions of dollars."

Our own Eric Bangeman captured the sentiment of the time with an article titled "YouTube’s future (or lack thereof)." The company raised a total of about $11.5 million in VC funding at the time, but at 200Tb a day in data, bandwidth cost an estimated $2 million a month. Despite YouTube's cash flow problem, Ars at the time noted advertising was "unobtrusive," with only "one or two ads on a page" and no pre-roll.

At that point, many didn't expect the company to survive. Early Net entrepreneur Jason Calacanis wrote "YouTube is not a real business" and compared it to Kazaa and Napster. Dot-com billionaire Mark Cuban expected the site would be "sued into oblivion" and said that "only a moron would buy YouTube."

Google buys YouTube

That "moron" was Google. On October 9, 2006, Google bought the then year-and-a-half-old YouTube for a staggering $1.65 billion. It was Google's biggest acquisition to date by $1.55 billion. Google bought a very popular site that was very expensive to run and lacked a business model. It was staring down potentially billions in lawsuits from music, movie, and TV companies—and Google did it anyway.

In hindsight, Google and YouTube were a match made in heaven. Google, which already ran Google Search, AdWords/AdSense, Gmail, Google Maps, Google News, and Blogger, brought tons of big-site know-how to YouTube. It had the infrastructure to not only keep the site growing, but Google could reduce its costs. This was one of the best outcomes for YouTube's revenue problem. Google already ran a massive ad network with tons of clients and ad inventory. It even had experience in the video space with its competing Google Video service, where it was already testing a pre-roll video ad system.

For a long time the move was derided as crazy, with articles titled "YouTube is Doomed" showing up as late as 2009. Like always, though, Google took a long-term view of things. Like a drill sergeant with a new recruit, the company started slowly and methodically whipping YouTube into shape.

Listing image by Archive.org/Ron Amadeo