4 (a) Chad Hurley – The Million Dollar Videos
Sharing Platforms worth Millions of Dollars
Chad Hurley – The Million Dollar Videos
When Chad Hurley sold YouTube to Google in October 2006 for $1.65 Billion, he was worth an estimated $345 Million. How did Chad who launched YouTube in November 2005 along with two of his former Paypal colleagues become a multi-millionaire in less than 12 months? 
Chad Hurley was born in 1976. He was interested in electronics and computer science since childhood. However, he studied fine arts from the University of Pennsylvania and graduated in 1999. He joined Paypal and was asked to design the logo for the company. With his colleagues Javed Karim and Steve Chen, he used to discuss ideas for starting an Internet business. As the story goes – one night in January 2005, when the three were trying to share some videos of a dinner party, they found that there was no simple way to share videos and decided to invent it and YouTube was born[i]. 
The site was developed over a span of 3 months and the first video was uploaded in April 2005. After opening the site for public in May, YouTube was officially launched in November 2005. People responded in massive numbers. Within a year they were uploading more than 65,000 new videos every day[ii]. Two years back, it had over 100 million viewers in the United States alone[iii]. YouTube had given the ability to the general public to share their personal videos within minutes to people anywhere in the world.
Despite many other competitive video sharing sites (more than 50 worldwide) making its appearance in recent years, YouTube has managed to retain its number one position. It is serving over a billion views every day worldwide, reported Chad Hurley on YouTube’s 4th Birthday. For more details visit –
Chart 4: YouTube.com Vs. Competition
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Chad Hurley has been the CEO of YouTube since Google purchased it. It is estimated that the site has made $500 million[iv] in revenues in 2009, a significant increase from $200 million in 2008. YouTube is also the No.4 in the most visited sites on Alexa.com.
[i] “Chad Hurley”. Wikipedia.com. 17 Feb 2010. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chad_Hurley>
[ii] “YouTube”. Wikipedia.com. 17 Feb 2010. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube>
[iii] “YouTube reaches 100 Million US Viewers”. YouTube Statistics. 5 Mar 2009. YouTubeReport2009 17 Feb 2010. <http://youtubereport2009.com/category/youtube-statistics/>
[iv] Liew, Jeremy. “YouTube to do $500 million in revenue in 2009?” 16 Mar 2009. LightSpeed Venture Partners. 17 Feb 2010. <http://lsvp.wordpress.com/2009/03/16/youtube-to-do-500m-in-revenue-in-2009/>
