YouTube

It's tricky to pinpoint exactly when this videosharing dotcom, which officially launched in December 2005, catapulted into global ubiquity — but the site's CEO, Chad Hurley, knew something was up in March 2006, when Bill Gates searched for himself on the website during a keynote address at a Microsoft convention. ''That's when it hit me,'' says Hurley, 29. ''People knew who we were.''

Do they ever: More than 100 million videos are streamed per day on YouTube, which might explain how a site made up of intimate confessionals, rejected TV pilots, and ''Macaca''-spouting politicians would be worth $1.65 billion to the geniuses at Google. Is there a website that more richly fulfills the populist promise of the Internet than YouTube? Anyone can upload a video of anything (e.g., Japanese karaoke game shows) and someone is virtually guaranteed to watch it and (most likely) enjoy it. Says Hurley, who runs the site with cofounder Steve Chen, 28: ''It's democratizing the entertainment experience.'' (So much so, in fact, that Time named ''You'' its Person of the Year, in part because YouTube's newfound democracy is ''seizing the reins of the global media.'')

Of course, YouTube's gloriously untamed landscape is already transforming itself: The deals it's struck with CBS and Universal Music, among others, are making bootlegged material harder to come by — although it's still kinda easy to find entire South Park episodes. The YouTube dudes say their top priority is keeping users happy; they're even considering a plan to pay the creators of some of the site's most popular videos. ''There's always going to be a place for TV, for the movies,'' says Hurley. ''[But] there's going to be a lot more people with digital cameras making content than there are people in professional studios. People actually have a chance to entertain themselves.'' —Adam B. Vary