It’s hard to imagine, but there really was a time before makeup tutorials, conspiracy explainers, on-demand music videos — really, viral videos at large.
Miss Jackson gets demonized by the FCC as a threat to decency, killing off her previously indestructible career overnight. The MTV-produced pop spectacle changed the world in so many ways. But one of the biggest is perhaps also one of the least known: It gave birth to YouTube.
About a year after the spectacle, in Silicon Valley, a trio of tech bros from PayPal were getting some dinner and discussing Janet Jackson’s breast. Chad Hurley, 29, Steven Cehn, 28, and Jawed Karim, 25, lamented how tough it was to find any footage of this incident online. In February 2004, there was no such thing as a “viral” video — even a moment as iconic as the Nipple Bounce was still a case of “If you missed it, you missed it.” Everybody was talking, blogging, and AIMing about Janet and Justin — but if you skipped the Super Bowl and didn’t bother to set your TiVo or VCR, you had no chance to witness what all the fuss was about, beyond edited clips on the news.
As Karim told USA Today in 2006, the guys pondered how cool it would be to have an online site for people to share video of the Super Bowl snafu, or the recent horrifying Indian Ocean tsunami. “I thought it would be a good idea,” Karim said. A year later, they launched YouTube, not that anyone noticed at first. Karim uploaded the site’s first clip on April 23rd, 2005: a 19-second video of himself visiting the elephants at the San Diego Zoo. A year later, practically everybody on earth was addicted to YouTube.
Social media was just starting in February 2004 — we were all on Friendster (just here to help!), MySpace was catching on, and Facebook launched three days after the Super Bowl. Yet it took a few months for YouTube to blow up — for most people, that came in December 2005, when “Lazy Sunday” hit Saturday Night Live and became a word-of-mouth sensation. The first time I ever heard of YouTube was after the “Lazy Sunday” sketch aired, when my friend Stephanie raved about it over dim sum: Andy Samberg, Chris Parnell, a Sunday afternoon macking on cupcakes and watching Chronicles of Narnia. Damn, I’d missed it — guess I had to wait six months for the rerun. Then she told me about YouTube. It’s hard to say which concept was more mind-blowing: the idea that something funny actually happened on SNL, or the idea that this new website existed.