YouTube is 20 years old. Did you know that it was originally a dating website?

We are on February 14, 2025. Do you know what it means? Yes, good Valentine’s Day, but there is also something else that deserves to be recalled today.

YouTube officially was 20 years old.

This is true, the largest video platform on the Internet as well as one of the most treated websites in the world, was founded on February 14, 2005.

It was at least at that time that three former Paypal employees – Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim – gathered and decided with a name: YouTube. Like Karim later explain In an early account of the history of Youtube, “The work started” on Youtube on February 14, 2005. The Domain name YouTube Dot Com was recorded 20 years ago on this date.

However, the video platform you know and love today was certainly not what they had in mind. Although the founders have already shared other reasons behind the start of YouTube, like not being able to find clips of the infamous Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson Super Bowl Halftime Show online, the reality is that the first iteration of YouTube was A dating website.

It’s true, YouTube was first intended to be a Online dating site.

Youtube in April 2005 as saved by Internet archives
Credit: Internet archive

In fact, you can check it out and confirm it yourself by looking at the The oldest archived version De Youtube which is recorded in the Internet Wayback machine archives from April 2005. From space to place at the top of the page, just below the connection section, is a domain to enter your gender identity , the sex type of person you are looking for to find and an age group that you are ready to go out with.

The Dot Youtube Dot Com recorded on Valentine’s Day begins to have a meaning now, right?

Unfortunately, for Chen, Hurley and Karim, no one signed up for YouTube, the dating site. The three even published on Craigslist, looking for women to download a video for $ 20, in the hope of launching an activity on the website, according to a Vice History From 2015. No one took them back either, according to the founders of Youtube.

The first YouTube video of all time

The co-founders of YouTube decided to abandon the dating aspect of the site shortly after and opened YouTube to all types of video downloads. With this pivot, the founders of YouTube themselves decided to download the very first video on the site themselves. On April 23, 2005, Karim downloaded “Me at the zoo”, a video featuring the founder speaking directly to an elephant camera while standing in front of the animals of the San Diego zoo.

YouTube will be officially launched in December 2005.

Even if YouTube is now synonymous with online video, it was actually not the first video platform on the Internet. Vimeo, for example, had launched an entire year before the launch of YouTube.

However, the same week as the official launch of YouTube to the public, Saturday Night Live broadcast his sketch “Lazy du Dimanche” by Lonely Island. An unauthorized download of video was published on YouTube and became viral, cementing YouTube from the start as a online destination for viral clips.

Less than a year later, in November 2006, Google acquired YouTube for $ 1.65 billion.