What made YouTube successful?

I think, Google buying out Youtube is what made it as successful as it is now as it highly popularized it, but I don't think that's a good thing. If Youtube hadn't been bought out by Google, there wouldn't be as much censorship and search result modifying as there is now, but on the other side, Youtube may not exist today with as many quality videos if it didn't just fade out all together given a dramatically lower popularity it would experience on it's own merit. I'd rather there had been a highly popular video search engine then one single site for popular videos on the internet and perhaps there will be in the future.

YouTube facilitated the process of uploading videos to the Internet which allowed a lot of newbs to start uploading videos to stroke their egos, so I guess that is what made YouTube so successful. Also, Google's acquisition of YouTube made YouTube a huge success.

YouTube takes care of the front and back end of everything, it is so simple to do anything on there.

Piracy did it all for youtube and still does.

People wanted a place to watch tv shows for free...so people uploaded them to youtube.

But the bigger one was people uploading music videos and what not to youtube. I think this lead to the explosive growth for youtube.

In addition to the other good answers ... the key word is FREE!!!

Would facebook, skype, twitter ... etc. have been as successful if people had to pay to use their products/services? I feel the answer would've been NO!

Human beings for the most part are Social by Nature. Social Media/Networking for FREE is almost like PR0N, well kind of =0p...