YouTube turns 15: How Nipplegate led to the groundbreaking website

Rolling Stone

The YouTube platform launched on Feb. 14, 2005, just one year after the Janet Jackson-Justin Timberlake Nipplegate incident at the Super Bowl. Co-creators Chad Hurley, Steven Chen and Jawed Karim developed YouTube after lamenting how hard it was to find footage of the Feb. 1, 2004 incident online. "YouTube was the right idea at the right time," says Rob Sheffield. "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." ALSO: YouTube helped save music videos from extinction.