The History of YouTube.com: How a $10 Domain Became a Billion-Dollar Empire
A Valentine’s Day Gamble
On February 14, 2005, three ex-PayPal employees dropped ten bucks and walked away with a domain that would eventually reshape global culture. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim didn’t know it yet, but youtube.com was destined for more than a placeholder site. At the time, their vision was small and awkward: an online dating service powered by video, pitched under the cringeworthy slogan “Tune In, Hook Up.”
The dating idea fizzled. But the tool they had built (an easy way to upload, convert, and watch video instantly in a browser) wasn’t just good….it was transformative.
Nineteen Seconds That Changed Everything
In April, Jawed Karim posted a short clip at the San Diego Zoo. “Me at the Zoo” featured Karim in front of elephants, mumbling about trunks. The production quality was nonexistent, the subject trivial. But the fact that it worked, that anyone could upload a clip and play it instantly, was groundbreaking.
Yes, the first YouTube video uploaded was of elephants at the San Diego Zoo. A fact they’re pretty proud of.
Uploading, converting and hosting this video wasn’t just a gimmick; it was the missing piece of the early internet. Broadband was spreading, camcorders were cheap, and MySpace had primed millions of people to share. With YouTube, the stage was set for video to finally go viral.
When the World Typed the Wrong Tube
But YouTube’s sudden explosion sent shockwaves into places nobody expected. In Perrysburg, Ohio, a company called Universal Tube & Rollform Equipment already owned utube.com. Their business was industrial, not digital: selling hulking machinery that bent steel tubing into shape.
When YouTube caught fire in late 2005, millions of curious users mistyped the address. Instead of pranks and skateboarding fails, they landed on the homepage of a baffled tube manufacturer. What followed was chaos. Universal Tube’s traffic ballooned from a few thousand hits a month to hundreds of millions. Their servers collapsed under the weight. Their inbox overflowed with angry messages from people who thought utube.com was supposed to be the video site.
The Ohio factory had not asked for fame, and yet it was drowning in it.
A Lawsuit Against a Rocket Ship
By 2006, Universal Tube was desperate. They sued YouTube for trademark infringement, claiming the similarity in names had wrecked their online business. At the same time, they were forced to abandon their original web address and rebrand as utubeonline.com, an inelegant fix for a problem they hadn’t caused.
But the lawsuit was always a long shot. By the time it wound its way through court, YouTube had already outgrown such distractions. The little dating-site-that-wasn’t was now one of the fastest-growing properties on the internet, a rocket ship nobody could catch.
Google Buys the Future
The story could have ended there, with two tubes fighting in obscurity. But in October 2006, Google changed the stakes. Less than two years after Hurley, Chen, and Karim had registered the domain for ten dollars, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock.
The misdirected traffic, the lawsuits, the confusion, all of it was rendered moot. YouTube wasn’t just a startup anymore. It was the future of online media, and Google had paid handsomely to own it.
The Afterlife of an Ohio Factory
Universal Tube, meanwhile, returned to its corner of the internet. They moved on with their machinery business, still selling rollform equipment to a specialized market, still online at utubeonline.com. Their brush with fame became a cautionary tale: the wrong place at the wrong time, collateral damage of a global phenomenon.
YouTube went on to become the world’s broadcast tower, the place where pop stars launch, presidents campaign, and billions of people vanish into algorithmic rabbit holes.
One company got swallowed by history. The other rewrote it.
The Moral in One Keystroke
What started as a $10 domain experiment, ended up becoming a billion-dollar empire that nearly sank a tube factory in Ohio…all because of a missing “yo” in a URL. On the internet, the distance between obscurity and empire can be as thin as a typo.
