YouTube changed the game when it burst onto the scenes in 2005. The platform was registered on Valentines Day that year and officially launched a few months later, in December. The founders were three former employees of the American e-commerce company PayPal.
Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim suspected that ordinary people might enjoy sharing their “home videos” with the public. But they probably could never have anticipated just how successful and lucrative YouTube would go on to become.
According to SEMrush statistics, the video sharing platform experienced a 4.9% growth rate in 2021. By 2022, the number of YouTube viewers had reached 210 million - in the U.S. alone. And it's just continued to grow. Globally, YouTube’s users are expected to reach 2.85 billion in 2025.
Ordinary people have become overnight celebrities thanks to YouTube's success. People like MrBeast who, as of October 2025, had a cool 446 million subscribers. His real name is James Stephen "Jimmy" Donaldson. And his net worth is approximately $2.6 billion, according to Celebrity Net Worth. Not bad at all for a 27-year-old.
Not only is he laughing all the way to the bank. But he's reportedly even planning to open his own bank. Donaldson applied to register the trademark "MrBeast Financial" on 13 October 2025. The trademark application lists plans for a “mobile app and online services for a range of banking, financial advisory, crypto exchange, and other services.”
If you've ever wondered what the very first YouTube video was, here you go... Titled "Me at the zoo," grainy 19-second-long clip shows YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. And he really didn't have much to say except, "Alright, so here we are in front of the, uh, elephants. And the cool thing about these guys is that, is that they have really, really, really long, um, trunks, and that's, that's cool. And that's pretty much all there is to say."
The video marked its 20th anniversary earlier this year, along with the platform, and it shows just how far the YouTube has come.
That first grainy YouTube video is a far cry from a lot of the stuff we see on the platform today. Take MrBeast's productions for example. He revealed earlier this year that his his next video cost $4 million and took over a year to make. Many of his other videos come in with a similar, hefty production price tag.
Beast Industries has reportedly "had three years of losses, including more than $110 million in 2024," according to Bloomberg. The outlet noted that Donaldson spends $3 million - $4 million on each YouTube video. So it would seem that being the most popular YouTuber in the world doesn’t come cheap.
