Created in 2005, YouTube has become the way to share videos around the world, and some Alberta creators have been cashing in on its success
Ten years ago, the landscape of the Internet was a vastly different place. File sharing sites like Napster and Kazaa were on their way out, and something new was on its way in. On Feb., 14 2005, three former employees of PayPal changed the Internet forever. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim created a new way to share videos, YouTube.
This social media breakthrough started with a video of Karim at the zoo, looking at elephants. This simple video paved the way for the six billion videos viewed monthly on the site, according to YouTube.com.
In 2007 the site created its partner program, which allows creators to start making a profit from their content. According to the site, thousands of channels from around the world are making six figures annually from uploading their videos.
Three Alberta-based creators were interviewed. One of them is Dan Hammill who lives in Lethbridge.
With his subscriber count passing 150,000 and views climbing to above 24 million, Hammill realized his hobby could be a real career in 2012. “I became a YouTube partner, that’s when I started making money. It wasn’t really anything back then, but you know to get a couple hundred bucks or something was pretty awesome. It suddenly became legitimate overnight, people went from disregarding my hobby as anything, to suddenly it’s the coolest thing ever.”