The surprising origin of the YouTube concept looks nothing like what the site eventually became. Instead of the varied video uploading space that YouTube has become, its founders envisioned a unique video-enabled internet dating site for its future. “The idea was for single people to make videos introducing themselves and saying what they were looking for,” Steve Chen, the company’s co-founder said at the SXSW conference in 2016.
Online dating was starting to flourish at the time YouTube was created. In 1995 — even before Google’s own launch — Match.com was established as the trend setter in what would become the online dating world. In the 10 years between Match and YouTube, digital matchmaking was the butt of many jokes. In 2000, eHarmony was founded, and its approach focused on the psychology of love rather than gaudy images of potential love interests.
Even still, these sites required users to write up a short bio, including a few features they were looking for in a match. The format easily bred cliché, feeding the fire of comedy taking aim at the services. YouTube purported to be a different sort of dating space. Instead of imagining what a person was like, you could watch a video of them talking about themselves and their interests.
Communication is certainly about words, but body language, inflection, and more all feed into the core of who a person is. YouTube’s initial purpose was designed to capitalize on these aspects of real connection between people.
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