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YouTube Turns 20: from a video sharing platform to general purpose technology
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Date 8 May 2025
It’s been two decades since the first video was uploaded to YouTube—a 19-second clip titled Me at the Zoo, featuring co-founder Jawed Karim standing awkwardly in front of elephants at San Diego Zoo. The unassuming video has been viewed over 300 million times and marks the beginning of what would become one of the most influential platforms on the internet.
Since its beginnings as a website for everyday video-sharing in 2005, YouTube has grown into a sprawling ecosystem that has reshaped how we watch, learn, and interact with media. It is also one of the world’s most powerful digital media platforms and now competes with other powerful social media and streaming television platforms. In February this year, YouTube was hosting an estimated 5.1 billion videos, with uploads increasing by over 360 hours every minute. This number has nearly doubled since 2021.
Distinguished Professor Jean Burgess, Associate Director of the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S), GenAI Lab Director at QUT and co-author of the first academic book on YouTube, reflected on the platform’s evolution during a recent interview on ABC Radio.
“In 2005, we couldn’t quite work out what YouTube was going to be,” Burgess said. “The internet had been used for communication and blogs, but the idea of it being a widely accessible audiovisual medium was really quite new.”
The platform became popular quickly. Just a year after launch, Google acquired YouTube for US$1.65 billion in stock—a deal that seemed like a big bet at the time, but that now looks like a bargain.
“There was this real excitement about the idea that people could take part in creative media and share their thoughts and everyday experiences.”
Early adopters included not only internet-savvy young people, but also hobbyists, educators, and people looking for online community.
“There was a tremendous use of it for education, sharing ideas, tips and tricks, from guitar-playing to car repairs, as well as just for having fun and showing off. And people started to make a name for themselves.”
Today, YouTube is the go-to platform for everything from DIY tutorials to music videos and product reviews.
Listeners calling into the program shared what they’d learned from the site. One had restored a vintage Kombi van, another picked up sailing techniques for dinghies, and many credit golf tutorials for a better swing.
Burgess noted that this educational use was present from the start. “It was really hard at the time to take video from your camera, upload it, and share on your personal website in a way that made it easy for others to view – YouTube founders solved this technical problem early on.”
YouTube’s broad reach brings with it growing concerns around content quality and algorithm-driven radicalisation.
Increasingly, attention is turning to the rise of AI-generated content on the platform, where platforms need to deal with challenges around misinformation and a flood of poor-quality content.
“There are all sorts of ways platforms govern and control what appears on them, if they choose to – but often only in response to external pressure from advertisers or the public,” said Professor Jean Burgess.
These issues are central to the Generative Authenticity project led by Professor Burgess and her team at the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S).
Originally published in 2009 when YouTube was only four years old (second edition 2018), Professor Burgess’s book with Joshua Green, YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture, was the first to systematically investigate its cultural impacts and politics, highlighting the productive tensions between its amateur community rhetoric and its commercial media logics.
