YouTube was acquired for $1.65 billion by Google in October 2006. The story of how three guys made hundreds of millions of dollars in one year is a great tale of entrepreneurial success. But what happened to the first users who posted their videos on the site and told their friends to do the same? We don’t hear about them, because they did not get anything (other than free video hosting). Wasn’t it really these users that helped turn YouTube into a multi-billion dollar company? Sure the site is great and the founders deserve all the credit they get, but it is the users who ultimately made it valuable. There are plenty of video sites, and if it wasn’t YouTube, another site could have filled the space, become a household name and been acquired for an amazing price.

We are not trying to pick on YouTube (which we happen to love using). How about the early users of Skype? What about those who first downloaded the software, made calls to their friends in different countries and told their parents to use it as well? They did not see a penny of the $2.6 billion that eBay paid for the company in September 2005. And MySpace? How about the millions of members there? How did they do when News Corp. bought the company for almost $600 million? After all, it was the members that Rupert Murdoch was after when he purchased the site.