- YouTube was founded in February 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim and launched in May 2005. It was acquired by Google in October 2006 for $1.65 billion. - It grew rapidly to become the largest and fastest growing video sharing site, streaming over 100 million videos per day with 65,000 new videos uploaded daily. - Factors contributing to its success included allowing embedding of videos on other sites like MySpace which drove traffic, distributing popular and hard to find video content, and its Flash-based video player that provided a good user experience across different platforms and browsers.