The world's largest video site has romantic roots, says co-founder Steve Chen. Guess what day the YouTube domain name was registered? Lon

YouTube started as an online dating site

submited by

Style Pass

2024-10-19 08:00:02

The world's largest video site has romantic roots, says co-founder Steve Chen. Guess what day the YouTube domain name was registered?

Long before Tinder made swiping a thing for matchmaking apps, there was a little-known video site trying to play cupid to the Internet generation: YouTube.

That's not exactly what comes to mind when you think of the world's largest video site, which welcomes a billion visitors a month. But that's how the YouTube, which Google bought in 2006 for $1.6 billion, got its start, said co-founder Steve Chen.

"We always thought there was something with video there, but what would be the actual practical application?" Chen said Monday at the South by Southwest tech, film and music conference in Austin, Texas. "We thought dating would be the obvious choice."

The idea was for single people to make videos introducing themselves and saying what they were looking for, said Chen. After five days no one had uploaded a single video, so he and the other co-founders, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim, reconsidered.