INTRODUCTION The way you can earn money has changed dramatically in recent years. Many things like banking, shopping and even business have been digitized. All the business transactions that happen online are what e-commerce represents. In the e-commerce industry, new ways to generate money are constantly being created. Currently one of the most popular ways to make money is through the video sharing site YouTube. This essay will discuss the history of YouTube, the site's infrastructure, look at the business side of the site regarding the partner program, and look at how businesses use the site productively. Finally it will mention what is expected from the future and why this way of doing business will only increase drastically. THE HISTORY OF YOUTUBE The YouTube website was created in 2005 by Chad Hurley and Steven Chen (Maney, 2006). The site was initially created to be a simple personal video sharing site. The idea was that a person would upload a video to the site and then friends and family would be able to view it on the site. In October 2006, Google announced that it would purchase the site for $1.65 billion (Maney, 2006). Some websites or products thrive more under big corporate names like Google (Maney, 2006). For this reason the creators agreed to sell it. Google saw the website as a future investment due to the number of users it had but, more importantly, how quickly the site was growing. Since August 2005 YouTube had 2.8 million views which increased to 72 million just one year later. After Google purchased the website, the site continued to grow and showed no signs of stopping. The reason for the site's popularity is... half of the paper... times have changed since the dot-com boom. USA Today, 3-4.Park, H., & Heo, Y. (2013). How do news organizations use social media to engage and connect with their audiences? Pusan: Springer Science.Perez, A., & Marcus, A. (2010). m-YouTube mobile UI: Video selection based on social influence. London: Springer-Verlag London Limited.Pham, A. (2013). YouTube 3.0 show me the money. Billboard, 26-28. Torres, R., Finamore, A., Kim, J. R., Mellia, M., Munafo, M., & Rao, S. (2011). Analysis of video server selection strategies in the YouTube CDN. West Lafeyette: Purdue University. Wattenhofer, M., Wattenhofer, R., & Zhu, Z. (2011). The social network YouTube. Zurich: ETH Zurich.Whitney, D. (2008). Ads on YouTube: a wonder for the Web. TelevisionWeek, 27-28. Zapotosky, M. (2014). Go. Man admits to taking over Google accounts and YouTube channels for advertising money. The Washington Post.