Before It Became What It Is Now, YouTube Was Almost a Dating App

News outlet Kompas.com reports that when YouTube was first conceived, the founders—the late Steve Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim—mused that dating could be a practical use for the platform. The idea, initially proposed with dating as the most obvious option, was explored for about five days. However, no one uploaded a self-introduction video for dating, and the founders pivoted: “Okay, forget the dating aspect. Let’s open it up to videos of any kind,” Chen said. YouTube thus became a platform for a wide variety of videos, not a dating site. Since being bought by Google in 2006 for $1.6 billion, YouTube has surged as a video streaming platform. Today, YouTube has more than 2.5 billion monthly active users globally and is a home for creators worldwide, with more than 500 hours of video uploaded every minute. Although it is now iconic as a video streaming platform, the history of YouTube nearly becoming a dating app is a notable footnote. One piece of its history is that the domain name YouTube was registered on Valentine’s Day, 14 February 2005.