YouTube was a video dating site for five days — then nobody showed up

In February 2005, three former PayPal employees — Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim — registered the domain YouTube.com. Their idea was a video version of Hot or Not: an online dating site where users would upload videos introducing themselves. They called it Tune In Hook Up. To seed the site, they posted on Craigslist offering women $100 each to upload videos of themselves.

The dating concept failed immediately. Few women responded to the Craigslist posts, and the few videos that appeared were not enough to build a dating service. The founders realized that the problem was not the execution — it was the concept. People did not want to introduce themselves on video to strangers.

Within days, the founders dropped the dating premise entirely. They opened the site to any video — home movies, funny clips, whatever users wanted to share. On April 23, 2005, Jawed Karim uploaded the first video: 18 seconds of himself at the San Diego Zoo, titled 'Me at the zoo.' The site grew slowly at first, then exploded as users discovered they could embed videos on blogs and MySpace pages.

By July 2006, YouTube was serving 100 million video views per day. In November 2006, Google acquired the company for $1.65 billion in stock. The video dating site that nobody used had become the world's largest video platform.