Today claim to have found love on youtube can potentially generate a laugh, as your friends might think you’ve fallen for some influencer. However, if put in the right period, such a statement can actually make sense.
Indeed, as also mentioned by SlashGear, YouTube it was originally a dating site, at least as explained by one of the co-founders of the platform. In this regard, Steve Chen illustrated in 2016, as part of a SXSW conference, that initially the portal we know today for videos of the most diverse types was supposed to help people find their better half.
“The idea was for singles to make introduction videos to indicate what they were looking for“, explained Chen. In short, a very different concept from the YouTube we know today. To understand the idea, however, we need to contextualize the times when YouTube was about to be launched, given that the platform became operational in 2005.
At the time, dating portals like Match.com had already been around for about 10 years and it was an industry that was starting to thrive. In this context, YouTube presented itself as a different way to meet people, focusing on a video presentation rather than written biographies. In simple terms, one no longer had to “imagine” what the other person was like before seeing her.
Understand well, then, that in that period the idea indicated by Chen made more sense than it might seem today. The founding of YouTube and the resulting domain registration actually dates back, not surprisingly at this point, to February 14, 2005: yes, Valentine’s Day. However, the video dating portal idea didn’t go as planned.
Indeed, in the first five days no one uploaded videos, then subsequently the big names behind YouTube, that is, in addition to the aforementioned Steve Chen, Jawed Karim and Chad Hurley, decided to open the platform to all types of videos. The rest is history, including the acquisition of the platform by Google, dating back to 2006.