YouTube at 10: how video-sharing website took over pop culture

It's a fact easily forgotten, but before Justin Bieber was a tabloid fixture, a Calvin Klein model and a teen cult leader, he was a tiny, backlit figure swaying in front of a cinderblock wall, singing Ne-Yo's So Sick in a pre-pubescent tenor.

It was a clip shot at a local singing competition in Stratford, Ontario, where Bieber, then 12, came third. When his mother uploaded it to YouTube in January 2007 to share with family members outside of Stratford, she probably didn't imagine that, eight years later, the fuzzy, handheld video would have 7.3 million views. Or that it would catch the attention of Bieber's now-manager, Scooter Braun. Or that, in the future, Bieber's meticulously orchestrated YouTube videos would be shot by teams of highly paid professionals.

In many ways, the narrative of Justin Bieber, arguably one of YouTube's original mainstream stars, is also the story of YouTube, itself.

The massive video-sharing site turned 10 years old this month, which almost passes for old age on the internet. And yet, for much of its history, YouTube was the upstart, the disruptor, the 12-year-old kid just revving to conquer the pop culture machine.

"That's what we're all about," co-founder Chad Hurley said in 2005. "We're the ultimate reality TV."

Of course, at the time, Hurley meant "reality TV" in its most literal sense - actual people, filming dispatches from their actual lives.