Steve Chen in the context of "YouTube"

YouTube is an American social media and online video sharing platform owned by Google. YouTube was founded on February 14, 2005, by Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim, and Steve Chen, who were former employees of PayPal. Headquartered in San Bruno, California, it is the second-most-visited website in the world, after Google. In January 2024, YouTube had more than 2.7 billion monthly active users, who collectively watched more than one billion hours of videos every day. As of May 2019, videos were being uploaded to the platform at a rate of more than 500 hours of content per minute, and as of mid-2024, there were approximately 14.8 billion videos in total.

On November 13, 2006, YouTube was purchased by Google for US$1.65 billion (equivalent to $2.39 billion in 2024). Google expanded YouTube's business model from generating revenue through advertisements alone to offering paid content such as movies and exclusive content explicitly produced for YouTube. It also offers YouTube Premium, a paid subscription option for watching content without ads. YouTube incorporated the Google AdSense program, generating more revenue for both YouTube and approved content creators. In 2023, YouTube's advertising revenue totaled $31.7 billion, a 2% increase from the $31.1 billion reported in 2022. From Q4 2023 to Q3 2024, YouTube's combined revenue from advertising and subscriptions exceeded $50 billion.