From a dating form
to a grid of thumbnails

The earliest homepage in this selection is mostly white space. A small login box sits under the old YouTube logo, and below it a line of drop-downs reads I'm a Male seeking Everyone between 18 and 45. Favorites, messages, videos and profile links sit above the box. There is no feed to scroll.

Co-founder Steve Chen later described the original pitch as a video dating site, before the founders opened it up to any kind of video.^[1] That form is what’s left of the idea. The screenshot can’t play anything, either. Its large Flash area is blank.

The familiar Broadcast Yourself. is already in the browser title, and the footer calls the company YouTube, LLC™. Even this sparse page has terms, a privacy policy and an About Us link. The homepage has its legal pages before it has the famous list of videos.

The form didn’t last. By mid-June 2005 the homepage called YouTube Your Digital Video Repository, with one search box, a cloud of tags and a row of Featured Videos. One of the featured videos on July 15 was Baby Food Eating Contest.

By March 2006, Today's Featured Videos... fills the center. Each item reads like a small classified ad: thumbnail, title, description, tags, category, uploader, running time, views, comments and a star rating. Canyon Swing in Queenstown, NZ has 22,287 views, and a Nokia 7380 review sits farther down. All of that sits next to each video before you press play.

The right-hand column is about people. The HTML lists Last 5 users online..., with separate counts for videos, favorites and friends. A tag cloud mixes ordinary words with usernames and scripts from different languages. And the footer still has its own Safety Tips link.

The March 2007 page names its curator: Featured Videos selected by: YouTube Editors. That January, YouTube’s blog had introduced its homepage editors and walked through a week of picking features.^[2] The still opens with a row of Director Videos, and below it Hamster Dance starts the featured list. Named sections, picked by named people.

Around the list runs a second layer of navigation, with QuickList at the top, account links on the right, and Active Channels and Active Groups underneath. The footer offers a Video Toolbox and TestTube. The What's New copy calls TestTube a place to try features still in development.

In June 2008 a row labeled Promoted Videos sits above the featured list. The second featured item is Fred on Father's Day, with 1,311,872 views. A familiar face, in a layout still made of blue links, descriptions and stars. In April 2009, YouTube’s own blog called Fred the first channel to reach a million subscribers.^[3] Seven more handovers led to MrBeast: every #1 channel since Fred.

Read the small print and another era shows up. Video Annotations promises interactive commentary and links, an Updated Inbox helps manage messages and invites, and a whole paragraph, YouTube in your Living Room, explains how to watch on a TV. The homepage is still explaining what the service can do.

The November 2009 page is a stack of bordered boxes, Videos Being Watched Now, Featured Videos, then Most Popular, with category blocks that let news, sport, gaming and music share a single screen. Several videos now fit across a row. The right-hand column has shrunk.

What's New announces 1080p Launches and Comment Search, and the footer links split YouTube on your phone, on your site and on your TV. The page is organizing ways to use YouTube. Not just things to watch.

On October 31, 2010, the logo dresses up for Halloween, with a ghost wrapped around Tube. A Recommended for You box now sits above the video categories. In our replay it holds no videos. It says Personalized video recommendations and asks you to watch something, then come back.

The code says more. A help panel explains that the box uses your viewing history and suggests signing in for steadier recommendations. The visible page and the hidden text do different jobs: one invites a stranger in, the other describes how the page will change once you’ve used it.

June 2011 keeps the category blocks, and the right column still has trending and featured sections, labeled Trends and Featured in this capture. In January YouTube had explained what the redesign was for: room for personally relevant videos, subscriptions and things your friends shared. That rollout was for signed-in users.^[4] Our archived homepage is the signed-out view, so nobody’s subscriptions appear.

The February 2012 still has a grey background and a nearly black guide down the left. Sign in to add channels to your homepage sits above the guide, and a narrow stream of videos, which the guide calls From YouTube, runs down the middle. The HTML also contains a privacy notice, We're changing our privacy policy. This stuff matters., but it is only in the source: it isn’t open in the still, and it doesn’t tell us when any policy took effect.

By December the same address has a white canvas, a smaller guide and shelves of videos. Even the browser title gets shorter. February’s YouTube - Broadcast Yourself. becomes plain YouTube.

December 10, 2012
The Music shelf includes Farmer Style (Gangnam Style Parody); PSY appears in the right column. Eleven days later, PSY’s original Gangnam Style became the first video to reach a billion views.^[5] The milestone happened after this screenshot, not on its capture date.

In February 2013 the first rows include UGA Men's Swim & Dive Harlem Shake and Harlem Shake (Black Edition). Popular on YouTube is still at the top of the guide. A small line underneath says Sign in to add channels to your guide and for great recommendations!

The code carries onboarding messages too, This is your guide and Never get lost, each with a Got it! button. They are in the source, not open on the screen. The guide is turning into the one fixed piece of navigation around a selection of videos that changes all the time.

The 2014 page has horizontal shelves. Red Subscribe buttons, too. It is also visibly incomplete, with many thumbnail spaces left pale grey while the titles and channel names survive, and the full-page view keeps those gaps. These thumbnail spaces are grey in this replay.

By December 2015 the shelves hold whole channels as well as categories. Thumbnails are compact and evenly spaced, with titles beneath them and Subscribe buttons lined up on the right. There is far less prose than in the 2006 featured list. In the full-page replay the Ad Solutions and ABC News shelves have grey thumbnail rows, with the titles still underneath.

The June 2016 homepage opens with Popular Right Now. Farther down, between two shelves, it even asks you a question: How many videos on this page are videos you've already watched and don't want to watch again? The answers in the HTML run from None to All. The full-page replay also keeps a grey thumbnail row in the Britain’s Got Talent shelf.

YouTube Red is in the left guide, next to music, gaming and the other video categories, so a paid service sits right beside the free feed. The footer still reads Restricted Mode, as in December 2015.

Our June 2017 capture still has the older logo, with Tube inside the red shape, and Trending at the top of the page. YouTube announced the play-button icon and the updated wordmark on August 29, together with its Material Design desktop redesign.^[8] That announcement came after the June page shown here.

The June 2018 capture has the newer mark, a red play icon in front of the word YouTube. Under it the homepage still uses the familiar compact shelves. New logo, old layout. A year later, in June 2019, Trending and the channel rows carry on in the same compact layout.

June 2020 is still packed with small thumbnails, and a COVID-19 news shelf breaks up the sequence with more categories below it. Here it is the content that dates the page, as much as the interface.

By June 2021 bigger thumbnails and channel avatars fill a broad grid, with topic chips above the videos. MrBeast’s Make THIS Shot, Win $300,000 is in the grid, and the archived page data records 25,776,511 views. Farther down, Trending and COVID-19 news are still named shelves. The grid took over the first screen. It didn’t remove every section below it.

The June 2022 capture drops a wide YouTube Music promotion between the video rows: RELEASED this week! A big tile grid and a service banner can share the page without going back to the boxed portal of 2009.

The September 2023 page carries a big NFL Sunday Ticket banner. Lower down, a Shorts shelf changes the shape of the page, with tall cards in among the wide thumbnails. Video formats now sort the page as much as topics do.

On March 10, 2024, the recommendation grid is gone from our signed-out capture. A YouTube TV advert still sits at the top. Beneath it is a single card, Try searching to get started, whose next line asks you to start watching so YouTube can build a feed. News reports that day described the same blank signed-out homepage.^[9]

In June 2025 the page keeps the invitation and drops the big advert, so all that remains is search, the left guide and a sign-in prompt above a wide area that stays empty.

The April 2026 capture keeps that layout. The guide links to Shorts, subscriptions, history, music and other topics, plus a More from YouTube group of services. Once, this page introduced you to other people’s videos. In our April 2026 capture, it waits for you to pick the first one.

2006 · Featured2026 · Search

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A watch page gives us something fixed: Me at the zoo, uploaded on April 23, 2005, is YouTube’s first video,^[10] under twenty seconds of co-founder Jawed Karim at the San Diego Zoo. Someone else held the camera. The description in our 2010 capture says so: The video was shot by Yakov Lapitsky at the San Diego Zoo.

Four archived visits to the page let us compare the interface around the same title. The black player areas here are inactive archive replays.

The early pages surround the player with blue links, ratings and comments. The later ones give the player more room, with channel details and action buttons underneath. In 2026 the counter shows 378M, and the page data stores 378,492,776. These are readings on four dates, not today’s live count.

The July 15, 2005 homepage lists a featured video with 19 views. That was a different video on a different date, so the two counts don’t measure the same thing.