In part two of How YouTube Ate TV, Fast Company’s oral history of YouTube, we look at how the company’s rapid ascent after its 2005 founding led to multiple challenges, from bandwidth costs to unhappy copyright holders. This prompted the startup to consider selling itself, and on October 9, 2006, Google announced that it would be buying it, for $1.65 billion. That deal came with the promise that the web giant would help YouTube scale up even further without micromanaging it. Eventually, the balance they struck between integration and independence paid off. But when YouTube was still a tiny, plucky startup, nobody was looking that far ahead.

Part one: YouTube failed as a dating site. This one change altered its fortunes forever

Steve Chen, cofounder—with Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim—of You

See Full Page