As ubiquitous as it is today, we might easily forget that YouTube did not even exist in the early 21st century. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Kareem, all in their 20s, were employees at PayPal when they found that they had no good way of sharing videos with each other. The trio were inspired by a confluence of events: a San Francisco dinner party attended by all three where lots of video clips were taken; the 2004 Superbowl halftime show with Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction;” and the Asian tsunami that occurred early that same year. All three events were visual artifacts that needed to be shared, but the means for it did not exist before YouTube.

On this day, February 15, in 2005, a day after the billion-dollar YouTube.com domain name was registered, the website launched. It remained fairly static until the first video – of Chen at the zoo – was uploaded in late April.

Hurley, Chen and Kareem were able to devote their full attention to the new venture thanks to a generous payout from PayPal when the company was bought out by eBay. With their work, the website that gave rise to term “viral video” went, well, viral. A year after its launch, it was serving up 100 million video streams, with 65,000 new ones added daily. Several months after its first birthday, Google acquired YouTube for $1.6 billion in stock.