5/26/2008 - How YouTube Looked Like in the Past

When I first heard about YouTube, I didn't think a site could possibly exist for very long. I just couldn't fathom how many server farms would be needed in order to contain all the terabytes of video that anybody on the internet can just post there permanently. That's not to mention the bandwidth necessary to serve all the videos. Only when Google came on board did I believe that it was possible. I mean, if Google can index most of the internet, surely they've figured out how to make YouTube technically viable. Whether or not they can make it profitable is another thing. I'm starting to see these little ads embedded into the videos all over the place and while they're not really obstructive, I still hide the ad each time. Also, you can watch many videos in "higher quality", which tells me that they actually keep the source material while hosting a compressed version at the same time. Amazing.

With all these changes, it's interesting to look back and see how YouTube started out. With the Internet Wayback Machine (http://archive.org), we can get a glimpse of webpages as they were archived on certain dates. Here is a collection of those archived pages edited into its own YouTube video: