MCC026 - The History of YouTube

Gap-fill exercise

Fill in all the gaps, then press "Check" to check your answers. Use the "Hint" button to get a free letter if an answer is giving you trouble. You can also click on the "[?]" button to get a clue. Note that you will lose points if you ask for hints or clues!

Read the text about the history of Youtube  .  Decide which of the four words best fits each space.

 


YouTube was by three former employees of Paypal, Jawed Karim, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley in 2005. Over a decade later it has become one of the most visited sites in the history of the Internet.  Up to then, videos could not be on websites. It was a Janet Jackson Super Bowl incident as well as the southeast Asian tsunami of 2004 that triggered the idea.

In 2005 Sequoia Capital  to invest $ 11.5 million in YouTube, a new start-up that that had its first headquarters above a pizzeria in California.  In April 2005 , the first ever video, called “Me at the Zoo“, was uploaded by co-founder Karim.  Half a year later a Nike commercial the first video to receive one million views.

After extremely quick growth, Google bought the company for over $ 1.5 billion . However, the site was comparatively  small and hadn’t even many other parts of the world. By the end of the decade YouTube had signed contracts with TV stations which uploaded their videos for viewers to watch.

In 2010 YouTube started introducing ads to their videos. As audiences started to the importance of the website, others had the opportunity to a living by posting videos and receiving a small part of the money generated from commercials.

In 2012 , the first every video to hit one billion views was Psy’s “Gangnam Style” , shortly after the site announced four billion daily  video .

Today YouTube offers such as paid movies and live streaming. 300 hours of video are uploaded every  minute.  In the years ahead , YouTube will remain the most watched video service and it has already replaced television as a major of news.