if you liked this epic social commentary on the state of online media then i have a more expansive videoless video essay on the state of youtube for you!

YouTube was founded by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. The trio were early employees of PayPal, which left them enriched after the company was bought by eBay.[14] Hurley had studied design at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and Chen and Karim studied computer science together at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.[15]

According to a story that has often been repeated in the media, Hurley and Chen developed the idea for YouTube during the early months of 2005, after they had experienced difficulty sharing videos that had been shot at a dinner party at Chen's apartment in San Francisco. Karim did not attend the party and denied that it had occurred, but Chen remarked that the idea that YouTube was founded after a dinner party "was probably very strengthened by marketing ideas around creating a story that was very digestible".[16]

Karim said the inspiration for YouTube came from the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show controversy when Janet Jackson's breast was briefly exposed by Justin Timberlake during the halftime show. Karim could not easily find video clips of the incident and the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami online, which led to the idea of a video-sharing site.[17][18] Hurley and Chen said that the original idea for YouTube was a video version of an online dating service and had been [read more]