Technology History | 71 East 3rd Avenue, San Mateo — The Dating Site That Nobody Used for Dating

The domain youtube.com was activated on 14 February 2005, and for months afterwards the company behind it barely existed as a place.

Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim had met at PayPal and left it, after eBay bought the company, with enough money to gamble on a weak idea.

The weak idea was dating. The site went up under the slogan Tune In, Hook Up, and almost nobody uploaded a dating video.

People uploaded everything else instead, so the founders stopped asking for anything in particular.

The address of record became 71 East 3rd Avenue in downtown San Mateo, rooms above a pizzeria and a Japanese restaurant. The International Directory of Company Histories says the operation graduated there from Hurley's garage, financed on Chen's credit cards.

The origin story usually told is a dinner party: video shot at Chen's San Francisco apartment, too awkward to pass around by email.

Karim says he was not there and that the party did not happen, and Chen has said the dinner-party version was strengthened by marketing thinking about a story people could swallow easily.

Karim's own account is duller and more convincing. He had gone looking for footage of the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime incident and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, and found that the web had nowhere to keep such things.

This was not the first video site. Metacafe had launched in 2003 and Vimeo in 2004; what YouTube got right was the part where a stranger could press play without installing anything.

The public beta opened that spring, and the first video went up on 23 April 2005.

Money followed. Sequoia Capital put in US$3.5 million in November 2005, and the site launched formally on 15 December, by then serving something like eight million video views a day.

Eighteen months after the domain was switched on, Google agreed to pay US$1.65 billion for it.

Nothing marks the building. Amici's East Coast Pizzeria still trades at number 69 on the same block, and the upstairs rooms where a handful of people ran the world's video archive are offices above a restaurant.

The photograph looks across the roofs of that block toward the Draper University tower, the old Benjamin Franklin Hotel, one street west. No freely licensed photograph of number 71 itself appears to exist.

Photo: mliu92 from San Mateo, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons