One of the most important acquisitions in the history of the tech front turns exactly 15 today: the most used video platform in the world, YouTube (which is technically also a social network), was acquired on October 10, 2006 by Google. Founded on February 14, 2005 (Valentine's Day) by Chad Hurley (CEO), Jawed Karim (Councillor) and Steve Chen (Technical Director), three guys who had previously worked for PayPal, YouTube soon passed into the galaxy of Mountain View, taken over with treasury shares by Google for a value of only 1,65 billion at the time. A fairly modest figure, if one considers, for example, that in 2014 Facebook paid Whatsapp 12 billion dollars, but only because it was one of the very first (and lucky) acquisitions in Silicon Valley.
In fact, under the management of Google, YouTube literally exploded: on 23 June 2017, the video content sharing platform reached the milestone of 1 billion visitors per month, thus becoming the second most visited website in the world, right behind of the parent company Google. But already in 2006, shortly before the deal, the company had communicated that they came every day viewed about 100 million videos, with 65.000 new movies added every 24 hours. The very first video uploaded to YouTube was Me at the zoo (Me at the zoo), posted by Jawed Karim, one of the founders, at 20:27 on April 23, 2005. The short film was shot in front of the elephant cage at the San Diego Zoo in California. Karim, whose username is jawed, was also the first user to register on the site.
Under the aegis of Google YouTube has also had to "clean up" its activity from a regulatory point of view, given the frequent violations of both privacy and copyright: YouTube has begun a massive activity of deleting videos that violate copyright rights , which numbered around 2006 in 100.000, and the suspension of accounts that uploaded these videos. Furthermore, from June 2011, the ability to select a Creative Commons license for posted videos. The author can select the CC BY license to allow visitors to download, reuse, edit and share the video without restrictions. Since 14 May 2007 the site has also been available in Italian.
