Biggest Unknown Fact: YouTube used to be a Dating Site

Social Media Agency, Ridesign Media recently shared a reel on Instagram regarding YouTube’s history which was quite shocking. Who could have imagined that the site which is known as the online video sharing platform was previously like Tinder and Bumble? Not even in my dreams, I could think so.

It’s hard to digest this fact, but it’s true. Can you guess its original slogan? When YouTube was founded in 2005 by former PayPal employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, the slogan was “Tune In, Hook Up.” That’s right, YouTube began as a dating site, but it turned out to be a huge failure. Later on, it became viral after the site was opened up for people to easily upload videos.

‘Me at the zoo’ was the first-ever official video that was uploaded on 23^rd April 2005 on Co-founder Jawed Karim’s channel at the San Diego Zoo. Now, it has over 165 million views and 7.7 million likes. The whole shift from a dating site to creating an exceptional video sharing platform was just because the three of them couldn’t find Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson Halftime show incident’s video. They realised the non-existence of such a platform and tweaked YouTube’s original form. As a matter of fact, the term “wardrobe malfunction” was coined by Timberlake referring to that incident, and was eventually added to the Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary. Later on, Google occupied YouTube in 2006 and transformed its base into global.