
YouTube was launched as a dating site - ElectronShak
https://web.archive.org/web/20050428014715/http://www.youtube.com/
======
salsadip
[https://www.cnet.com/news/youtube-started-as-an-online-
datin...](https://www.cnet.com/news/youtube-started-as-an-online-dating-site/)

Here's a little more info. They changed it to a general purpose video site
after 5 days after nobody uploaded any videos although they offered 20 USD to
each woman for uploading a self-introduction video.

~~~
ronilan
This wayback machine is from April 28, 2005. Me at the Zoo[1] is from April
23, 2005.

So technically speaking, someone did upload something. And 5 days is actually
really 5 days...

Which brings the question - what is the second oldest YouTube video still on
the site? Who is the “also ran”?

[1] [https://youtu.be/jNQXAC9IVRw](https://youtu.be/jNQXAC9IVRw)

~~~
computator
One of the comments on that video claims that the guy makes $5.9k-$93.7k per
year on that one 18-second video. Does that sound plausible and consistent
with what YouTube pays? Is there any way to check if he has actually monetized
his video?

~~~
P0l83q4p1Hw3Ul
$1-10 per 1k views.

73m views / 15 years = 5.2m views/year

=$5.2k/year - $52k/year.

Turn off Adblock and see if an ad plays.

------
nyx_
I didn't realize The Wayback Machine had so much YouTube content from the
early days. Really interesting going back and seeing what was on the front
page on some random day in 2006.

Looking at what people were uploading and what people were watching leaves me
feeling a bit wistful. It seems like it was a more authentic place before the
money caught up with it.

~~~
marssaxman
_It seems like it was a more authentic place before the money caught up with
it._

Isn't that the way it always goes? I wish there were some way of permanently
locking Wall Street out of the picture so we could actually have some nice
things.

~~~
komali2
That's the non-profit, free software world. It exists, gnu.org compiles a lot
of free software if you're interested, or there's other organizations that
compile stuff like free blueprints for farm equipment, free music, sprites,
etc.

It's out there, but a lot of people generally consider the free/libre stuff
"lower quality," which is often a fair accusation.

~~~
marssaxman
Oh, yes! - I use free software almost exclusively. It may not always be as
polished as the commercial competition, but it feels better to be part of a
sharing community. I feel especially fortunate that my current job allows me
to make a good living developing free software.

------
elliekelly
Reading the original Terms of Use & Privacy Policy linked in the capture gave
me a chuckle. It seems someone tried to find + replace div tags with p tags as
the documents repeatedly refer to "inpiduals."

~~~
kleiba
OT: in Emacs, you could prevent this from happening by using _C-u M-%_
(replace-word): in that case, only those instances of "div" that are separate
words (not parts of other words) will be replaced.

How would you avoid "inpiduals" (and similar mistakes) in other editors?

~~~
stefco_
In vim: :%s/\<div\>/p/g (add C at the end if you want to confirm each change)

~~~
allannienhuis
TIL what \< means. Thank you.

------
reaperducer
Another video service built on dating? Comcast's video-on-demand service.

Back when Comcast was promoting itself as having "The most on demand video!
More than _insert market competitor here_!" it included in that "most" count
each of the three-minute profile clips from its horribly lame video dating
service.

Distilled, AT&T (for example) would offer six full-length movies on demand,
while Comcast had 12 three-minute dating video clips, allowing it to claim
"twice as much" on-demand content.

~~~
stallmanite
Back when I had Comcast that was some of the most entertaining stuff to be
found on their on-demand service. I had totally forgotten about that thanks
for the trip down memory lane.

------
astura
And Hulu was originally launched as someone's personal homepage.

[https://web.archive.org/web/19991023065011/https://www.hulu....](https://web.archive.org/web/19991023065011/https://www.hulu.com/)

Wonder how much they sold the domain for.

~~~
ehsankia
And steam.com still refuses to sell the domain even if they haven't had a
server for years now:

[https://web.archive.org/web/20161022104434/http://www.steam....](https://web.archive.org/web/20161022104434/http://www.steam.com/)

~~~
Vinnl
I recently came across [https://gail.com/](https://gail.com/)

~~~
ehsankia
At least, that was a birthday present and it's her first name. The whole gmail
typo stuff is hilarious though, that's for sharing.

------
kds3
About Us [0] on webarchive from the same date is still relevant:

> YouTube is the first online community site that allows members to post and
> share personal videos.

[0]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20050428171556/http://www.youtub...](https://web.archive.org/web/20050428171556/http://www.youtube.com/about.php)

------
dlhavema
I never knew this. It gives a little more meaning to the domain name, but even
in it's current form, the domain name still works, just less literally.

------
avodonosov
The tabs and some other ui elements have round corners, as it was customary in
that days.

Everyone wanted and insisted to have this, despite it was very inconvenient to
build with pieces of images and tables.

~~~
_bxg1
And now it's trivial to do with CSS but largely out of fashion. Sigh.

~~~
avodonosov
BTW, for human eye it's _probably_ more harmonious, I don't mind seeing it
today when it's trivial technically. But indeed, out of fashion, which is
another demonstration of the lack of free thought in that area.

Sigh indeed.

------
wenbin
It was supposed to be "Hot or Not" with videos.

~~~
ronreiter
I HAVE AN IDEA: TINDER BUT WITH VIDEOS

~~~
creatornator
Tinder already lets you upload short gifs of yourself

~~~
adtac
yeah, but sound

------
skunkworker
I remember some of these super early launches of websites. At the time YouTube
launched I was using Google Video and I thought it was superior. I think I
visited the Youtube site once while it had it’s dating drop down but left
because there was no content to watch. The next 18 months were insane as
YouTube grew then got bought by Google.

------
rocky1138
It also launched during a time when most people watched video on a tube, hence
the name. This may not be immediately obvious to people born after ~2005.

~~~
quickthrower2
Even in 2005 people were chucking out their Cathode Ray Tube televisions in
favour of flatscreens.

~~~
endgame
Unless they played Smash.

------
chiefalchemist
I think one of the biggest bobbles of modern (social-centric) tech history was
Google not morphing YT into a more social platform. They had the name
recognition. They had the users. All they lacked was some basic functionality
to compete for social attention.

Instead they went for G+. The rest, as they say, is history.

~~~
sasnfbi1234
They basically tried this with the google + integration . But that was its own
mess also

~~~
Avamander
If they had not disrupted any users with the integration and turn people off
of G+ they could have pulled it off. I guess they'll try again in 15 years.

~~~
dredmorbius
I'm starting to suspect social may have burned over. At least in pesent
incarnations.

~~~
MagnumOpus
"Burned over" in the sense of zero growth - everyone who wants a FaceSnapGram
account has one.

Not burned out in terms of profit opportunities though - FB has $60bn revenue,
capturing even 10% of that pie can justify an investment of thousands of
person-years...

------
toxicFork
It's very interesting to scrub through the history of the first year, you can
see how they changed so much in that time

------
spullara
Interesting. By the time I looked at it while I was an EIR at Accel it was
definitely not a dating site and that was early 2005. My assessment was more
of a soft-porn / piracy site :)

~~~
jjirsa
I had a video site in the same era
([https://web.archive.org/web/20050701082257/http://www.vobbo....](https://web.archive.org/web/20050701082257/http://www.vobbo.com/))
and it was 100% soft porn and piracy, so much so that I shut it down because I
couldn’t justify the time spent moderating content (and I was a one man show,
didn’t want to get sued).

Should have tried to get funding, but had no idea what I was doing.

But yea, I totally believe YouTube spent a few years as soft porn and piracy
(which they clearly tolerated for eyeballs).

~~~
pbhjpbhj
They have a lot of softcore porn and piracy now. Indeed I've seen some things
on YouTube recently that look like pretty blatant porn, and weren't behind the
age-wall.

------
Descartes1
It was also made possible entirely by Macromedia Flash. (Purchased by Adobe
the same year).

------
michael86
You may want to check out this 2006 talk by Jawed Karim.
[https://youtu.be/7oJdD2oUHXc](https://youtu.be/7oJdD2oUHXc) This was shortly
after Google acquired them.

~~~
ElectronShak
This was great. Thanks for sharing!

------
shaanvp
1) Did anyone here use it? I'm curious what the UX was... Browse short video
profiles of people and then message the ones you like?

2) Does anyone know what caused the shift from Video Dating to just Video?

~~~
quickthrower2
To me it looks like some generic "PHP Script" dating site. I.e. you buy a
licence for I dunno $30 and install it on your shared hosting, ... , profit.

------
RocketSyntax
this is still a great idea... even with clips, dating apps are so static. body
language, tonality.

~~~
fortran77
I think there would be a market for a "verified weight / height / photo"
dating site. Maybe have kiosks set up where people can go get a photo taken,
on a scale, with a height gauge behind them from standard angles (front /
side) -- to avoid the infamous "myspace angles" that people use.

~~~
creatornator
If the first action in a relationship is one of distrust, it doesn't feel
right...

~~~
TeMPOraL
Interactions on dating sites happen _prior_ to a relationship.

Also, I think dating sites are a bit "a market for lemons".

~~~
TheDong
I don't think that's necessarily true. To be a market for lemons, in the
original sense, it's required that goods are objectively better or worse to
all buyers, and it's required that sellers know the value of their goods to
buyers.

Put more concretely, because different people have different dating
preferences, one person's lemon can be another person's peach.

In addition, a market for lemons usually requires a seller to be able to
determine the value of goods while the buyer can't. On dating sites, both the
user and the site itself are trying to "sell" that person to prospective
matches. Neither of those parties has all that much better of a way to
determine a person's match-ability, so there's not all that much asymmetry. I
suppose the site does know a little more based on history, but I don't think
that's necessarily enough.

I do think dating sites are pretty garbage, but I don't think it's due to the
phenomenon described by "a market for lemons", but rather due to multiple
other factors.

~~~
J-dawg
> one person's lemon can be another person's peach

That's a nice way of looking at the world, and of course it's true sometimes.

But...hasn't all the data coming out of dating sites kind of proved the
opposite? Especially for men, something like the top 10-20% are getting
basically _all_ the matches and messages.

~~~
taejo
At least to some extent, dating sites have _made_ the opposite. The more
people know about each other, the greater the variance in their assessments of
each others' attractiveness. ISTR a study that showed that the less people
know each other before starting dating, the more likely people are to end up
with partners who are about as physically attractive as themselves.

~~~
J-dawg
This is a good point. I guess it's important to remember that dating sites do
actually change people's behaviour, rather than being a representation of how
everyone behaves.

------
osrec
Interesting - I think the world was not ready for a video dating site back
then. This could probably work quite well now (thanks to the change in
peoples' attitude towards creating online video content, brought about by
YouTube itself)!

------
jgalt212
> I like the way the world looks from a bicycle.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqLtOjENz-Q&start=123](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqLtOjENz-Q&start=123)

------
hellofunk
It’s amazing how so many people don’t know this! I actually met my third wife
on the original site, it was a different time.

~~~
mothsonasloth
Where did you meet your fourth wife?

------
nullrouten
Some YouTubers went on to try launching dating sites again after the Google
acquisition.

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rkagerer
One of the comments says the video makes around $5.9k-93.7k per year. Fact or
fiction?

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retpirato
they changed their minds after 5 days? I guess it worked out for them in long
run, but they couldn't really expect much after that short of a time.

------
Ballas
The name was also supposed to be "YourTube"

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omarhaneef
Wait... what is it now?

Oh no, I have to go take down a few videos...

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throwaway66666
> [http://www.youtube.com/index.php](http://www.youtube.com/index.php)

I didn't know youtube's first version was written in php.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Interesting to see major sites with CSS issues like that, with the country
code ("GB" for me, in the UK) added the width on the logo box isn't wide
enough.

#yt-masthead #logo-container { margin-right: 20px; }

is a hacky fix.

They appear to be using position:absolute to get cheap vertical alignment to
put the GB at the top, but it removes from the flow and so gets overlaid.
"vertical-align:top" works, it seems, so I'm curious why they've not used that
instead?

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rhabarba
And it still works!

------
Edmond
news to me:)

