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Page rarely visited YouTube HQ—one person there while he was CEO remembered two trips—but during his rare appearances Page stuck to one edict: make videos load faster. Staff recalled Page stopping meetings to complain about YouTube’s buffering speed, which he once called, to YouTube’s embarrassment, “the biggest problem Google-wide.”

Hurley ran YouTube like someone who used YouTube and his exit cleared the way for managers to run YouTube Google’s way, with spreadsheets and algorithms.

Once, after noticing how often visitors conversed with one another through video, Chen ordered up a new feature on a Friday. Over the weekend coders created a simple button to add a video response posted beneath another. Uploaders then flooded popular clips with replies to get attention.

Google touted the social network’s success—“300 million monthly active users!”—without mentioning how many of them were forced to join. “It was all YouTubers!” recalled the VidCon founder Hank Green. “They could not see what they had. They could only see what they didn’t have.”

Thailand’s email, which came shortly after the YouTube acquisition, would be the first of many jarring reminders for Google of what it had bought: a free-for-all website accessible in countries that did not look particularly fondly on free expression.

Newcomers arrived, posting footage from family vacations, cat clips, and oddities not found on TV. Traffic from MySpace, coupled with the new features for comments and related videos, brought a steady flow to YouTube that would never relent.

A billion daily hours would be five times Facebook’s traffic, the largest on the internet, he explained. Then he added the punch line: “It will still only represent 20 percent of television. This is our percentage of the stomach.”

Some saw it as a dire turn for the wider internet, which had begun to put growth above the concerns of everyday people. (Facebook would later become a case in point.) “That’s the fate of all social media,” said Julie Mora-Blanco, an early YouTube moderator who went to work for Twitter. “You start with a small group, you cultivate a community, you g

After starting his account in 2009, Johnson quickly surmised two simple truths of the website: people came to see viral videos, particularly from regular people; and people liked to laugh, particularly at regular people.