YouTube was founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Jawed Karim and Steve Chen, three early employees of PayPal who had become wealthy after eBay bought PayPal. Their first idea was a video dating service inspired by the website Hot or Not, but they struggled to find enough dating videos, so they allowed all kinds of video. The first video, Me at the zoo, showing Karim at the San Diego Zoo, was uploaded on April 23, 2005. The site grew rapidly as viral clips spread, including a Saturday Night Live sketch called Lazy Sunday that drew millions of views through unofficial uploads. Google bought YouTube in 2006 for $1.65 billion in stock, and by 2011 more than three billion videos were being watched every day.

In 1909 D. W. Griffith made a 14-minute film about a speculator who corners the wheat market and doubles the price of bread. A farmer sows his field while a 'Wheat King' gambles in the Chicago wheat pit; bakers raise the loaf from five cents to ten and the poor line up for bread. Griffith cut back and forth between the farm, the feast and the breadline, a technique called parallel editing, so audiences saw both ends of the economy at once. The film drew on Frank Norris's stories and on a real scheme: months earlier Chicago financier James Patten had cornered wheat, sent bread prices up and made about $5 million, roughly $185 million today.