Twenty years ago today when Jawed Karim uploaded a grainy 19-second clip titled “Me at the Zoo” to his new platform, YouTube, he ushered in a new era in online video.

The video of Karim visiting the San Diego Zoo was the first to appear on YouTube, the video platform founded by him, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley. The trio sold the service to Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion, and in the nearly two decades since, YouTube has evolved from a simple video-sharing site into a global media juggernaut. 

If it was a stand-alone business, YouTube would be worth between $475 billion and $550 billion, according to analysts at MoffettNathanson. YouTube is the second-most visited website in the world, according to Similarweb, behind only Google, and more than 20 trillion videos — including music, Shorts, podcasts and more — have been uploaded to the site as of April, YouTube said Wednesday.

“This is the streaming winner,” MoffettNathanson founding partner Michael Nathanson told CNBC. “They don’t have to invest in content. They just hope that the creator community comes to them and builds their business.”

YouTube is on track to be the biggest media company by revenue in 2025, beating Disney, Nathanson said. Nielsen’s latest Media Distributor Gauge put YouTube in first place in total TV viewership by company, taking up 12% of time watched, ahead of Disney, Fox and Netflix.

Brad Erickson, RBC Capital Markets internet services senior analyst, agreed with Nathanson’s YouTube valuation, but he said that a sum-of-the-parts viewpoint is not always the best way to value aspects of internet companies on its own.

“YouTube benefits from the fact that it’s inside of Google’s business,” Erickson said. “They have contextual data about their user base from other parts of the business that massively benefit their ability to target and drive value with their advertising.”

YouTube remains a key pillar of Google’s business at a time when its core moneymaker, Search, is facing new pressure from the rise of artificial intelligence chatbots, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, and the company comes under fire from U.S. regulators pursuing antitrust cases.

Along with Google Cloud, YouTube is a critical driver of the company’s near- to medium-term growth, and could be a hedge if and when search ever slows down, Nathanson said. Together, they contribute more than 30% of Alphabet‘s total revenue and are its fastest-growing scaled businesses, according to MoffettNathanson.

The video service’s growth is primarily driven by its Premium, Music and YouTube TV subscription offerings. Nathanson estimates that YouTube Premium and Music have roughly 107 million paid subscribers collectively, and that is expected to grow to 145 million by the end of 2027. YouTube TV, meanwhile, will have roughly 11.5 million subscribers by the end of 2027, according to Nathanson’s estimates.

One of YouTube’s key competitors is TikTok, which gained popularity in the U.S. as a result of pandemic lockdowns in 2020. In response, Google invested in the development of YouTube Shorts, a short-form, vertical video feature within the video platform. Shorts competes with TikTok and also offers an ad-share program for creators.

Though Shorts has helped Google stay competitive in the short-form video market, Nathanson said the format has been a drag on YouTube’s overall revenue due to the ongoing challenges of monetization.

“It’s probably helping them drive engagement, but I don’t think it’s an added benefit to revenues,” said Nathanson.

Despite TikTok’s rise, YouTube continues to play a key role in the creator economy. Between 2021 and 2024, YouTube paid $70 billion to creators, with payouts rising each year, according YouTube CEO Neal Mohan.

Among those creators is Jacklyn Dallas, 23, who has been posting videos to YouTube since 2015 when she was 13 years old. Dallas has amassed nearly a quarter million subscribers since then.

“I think being a YouTuber is the greatest thing of all time,” said Dallas, whose full time job since graduating college is making videos for her NothingButTech channel. “There are all these doors and paths that would never be open previously that you now get to do and it’s all enabled, not only by YouTube, but also by the audience that watches the videos.”

Dallas has posted more than 500 videos to YouTube. Her videos include breakdowns about innovations in tech and interviews with tech executives, including Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

In her 10 years as a creator, Dallas says YouTube has significantly changed how creators can connect with their audiences, how YouTubers are perceived by the media and the value of a subscriber. Looking ahead, Dallas said she’s excited about new features the Google video service could implement to make it easier for creators to reach viewers that have yet to be announced.

“I feel like YouTube is like a knowledge game, and so anyone could become a creator if they put in the repetitions of learning what makes a great video,” Dallas said. “Data gives you the ability to do that.”

A key challenge for YouTube will be how Google parent company Alphabet fares in federal court.

A federal judge last week ruled that Google held illegal monopolies in online advertising markets. It’s unclear what remedies the Justice Department will seek in that case, but YouTube is a key focus and potential asset that Google could be forced to divest.

“Google will have incentives to encourage more competition possibly by loosening certain restrictions on certain media it controls, YouTube being one of them,” Gartner’s Andrew Frank said.

— CNBC’s Jennifer Elias contributed to this report.