--- title: "Which came first, the World Wide Web or YouTube?" description: "the World Wide Web vs YouTube: the World Wide Web came first, by 16 years — 1989 against 2005. What happened in each case." url: https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/world-wide-web-vs-youtube/ site: "At One Place" --- # Which came first, the World Wide Web or YouTube? **Which came first, the World Wide Web or YouTube?: the World Wide Web** 1989 — 16 years before YouTube the World Wide Web came first, by 16 years. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the proposal at CERN. ## Side by side | | the World Wide Web | YouTube | | --- | --- | --- | | Year | 1989 | 2005 | | Date | — | 2005-02-14 | | Category | technology | technology | | What happened | Tim Berners-Lee wrote the proposal at CERN. | The domain was registered; the first video followed in April. | ## the World Wide Web Berners-Lee circulated his proposal in March 1989, built the first browser and server by the end of 1990, and CERN put the software into the public domain in 1993. The Web is twenty years younger than the internet: the internet is the network, the Web is one service running on it, and email and file transfer both predate the Web by decades. The first website went live in December 1990 and is still online. ## YouTube The youtube.com domain was registered on Valentine's Day 2005, the first video — "Me at the zoo", 19 seconds of a co-founder at San Diego Zoo — was uploaded on 23 April, and the site opened publicly in the winter. Google bought it in November 2006 for $1.65 billion, about twenty months after the domain was registered. It is younger than Facebook by a year and older than Twitter by one. ## Common questions ### Which came first, the World Wide Web or YouTube? the World Wide Web, by 16 years — 1989 against 2005. ### When did the World Wide Web start? 1989. Tim Berners-Lee wrote the proposal at CERN. ### When did YouTube start? 2005. The domain was registered; the first video followed in April. ## Related pages - [Microsoft or the World Wide Web?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/microsoft-vs-world-wide-web/) - [Apple or the World Wide Web?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/apple-vs-world-wide-web/) - [the internet (ARPANET) or the World Wide Web?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/arpanet-vs-world-wide-web/) - [the internet (ARPANET) or YouTube?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/arpanet-vs-youtube/) - [email or the World Wide Web?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/email-vs-world-wide-web/) - [email or YouTube?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/email-vs-youtube/) - [the Macintosh or the World Wide Web?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/macintosh-vs-world-wide-web/) - [the Macintosh or YouTube?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/macintosh-vs-youtube/) - [Windows or the World Wide Web?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/windows-vs-world-wide-web/) - [Windows or YouTube?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/windows-vs-youtube/) - [Python or the World Wide Web?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/python-vs-world-wide-web/) - [Python or YouTube?](https://atoneplace.net/which-came-first/python-vs-youtube/) ## Sources - Wikidata — Wikimedia Foundation (https://www.wikidata.org/) [CC0 1.0]