 YouTube isn't very old, but already it has had a huge influence on the Internet and our lives. It has been ranked the fourth-most visited website on the Internet. It has created celebrities, like Susan Boyle and Andy Samberg. It has been used for shame campaigns to catch wrongdoers, such as the video of the woman throwing a cat in a garbage can. It has even become a tool for politicians to reach out to their constituents. What an amazing rise to power by a website founded above a pizza shop. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim are the three men who founded YouTube. They were in their late twenties when they realized that there was nowhere on the Internet to post video clips easily. The idea for a website where users could upload their own video content was born! In 2005, the three registered the domain name www.youtube.com. On April 23, 2005, the first video (“Me at the Zoo,” by Karim) was posted on the site. The website took off shortly after, with different funny or exciting videos becoming huge Internet hits. YouTube exploded. In 2006, Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock. Since then, YouTube has been used in political debates and is now receiving one billion new videos a day. Yet it still isn't profitable. The cost of hosting the videos far outstrips the money YouTube earns. This may be the oddest part of the story of YouTube: the site everyone wants is making nobody money. Perhaps that's part of the point, come to think of it. YouTube is about sharing, right? YouTube 成立至今尚未久遠，但它對網路及我們的生命已造成了重大影響。在網路上最多人造訪的網站中，它排名第四。它造就了如蘇珊• 波爾及安迪• 山博格這樣的名人。它被拿來舉辦「羞羞臉運動」，抓做錯事的人，如那位將貓丟進垃圾桶的女士的影片，YouTube 甚至變成政客跟選民聯絡的工具。這個在披薩店樓上被創辦的網站，一飛沖天的過程真是驚人。 查德• 赫爾利、陳士駿及傑瓦• 卡林就是創辦YouTube 的三個人。他們在將近三十歲時發現，網路上沒有容易刊載短片的地方。於是，創造「使用者能上傳影片的網站」的點子就此誕生！在2005 年，這三人註冊了www.youtube.com這個網域名稱。在2005 年4 月23 日，第一段影片（卡林的《我在動物園》）被貼上了網站。這網站很快地一飛沖天，各種有趣或刺激的影片成為網路上的大熱門。YouTube 大受歡迎。 在2006 年，谷歌用價值十六億五千萬美元的谷歌股票買下YouTube。從那時開始，YouTube 陸續被用在政治辯論上，現在每天仍收到十億段新影片。但它仍然未獲利，要容納這些影片的成本遠大過YouTube 的營收。這或許是YouTube 故事中最奇怪的部分：大家都想要的網站卻無法為任何人賺錢。這樣一想，或許這才算是重點，YouTube 就是用來分享的，對吧？ | 
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