Long before it became the biggest video site on the internet and was purchased for $1.6 billion in 2006, YouTube almost became a dating site. That’s right: instead of watching videos of kittens and viral videos, you would access the site to see videos of people looking for a relationship – kind of like Tinder from the past decade.
The person who told the secret was Steve Chen, co-founder of the site. “We always imagined that there should be something with video there, but what would be the practical applicability of that? We thought that ‘relationships’ would be the most obvious choice”, he explained.
The initial project was for single people to make videos introducing themselves and saying what profile they were looking for – and, come to think of it, some people are not far from this idea. After five days, no one had uploaded a single video, so Chen, Chad Hurley and Jawed Karim decided to think better.