YouTube told me to confirm my email and start uploading.
That was the welcome message. It also said I could comment on videos, which felt like an equally important part of the product in 2007.
I had been building and maintaining websites for years. Most of the internet I worked on was text, images, databases, downloads, and forms. Video was different. It was larger, slower, and much harder to move around reliably.
YouTube made the hard part look like a box on a web page.
The account confirmation does not prove I uploaded anything. It proves I wanted an account badly enough to register one. I was curious about every new place where people could publish, share, or build an audience. Sometimes that curiosity became a project. Sometimes it became another username I forgot about.
The welcome email used YouTube's old "Broadcast Yourself" line. The instructions were basic: confirm the address, then upload or comment. There was no creator dashboard, content plan, or reason to pretend that opening the account itself was a project.
Beatport was already proving that a specialized digital product could serve a global audience. YouTube was doing something much broader with video. The technical scale was obvious even from the outside. Every click could start moving a file much larger than an ordinary web page.
I had already spent years buying domains and trying small websites. A free account removed even that amount of friction. The place was already built. I only had to decide whether I had anything worth putting there.
For now, my part was simple. Confirm the address. See what the site could do.