YouTube founder Chad Hurley explains the virality hack he stole from PayPal

I just wanted to talk about one of the things about YouTube that made it so viral. Specifically the embid code. Before YouTube, I had never seen it before. Where did it come from?

Again, I hate to continue to refer to PayPal, but we had payment buttons, and we allow people to cut and paste payment buttons and put them on any website, blog, auction listing. So really, for us, that would expose more people to our brand, to our service, to our. Would lead people back to our site. We took that same idea and applied it to video embeds. The video embed gave people the opportunity to have a video solution for themselves that they could take with them. Even if you hadn't uploaded the video yourself, if you found an interesting video that somehow related to your blog post or personally represented you like in terms of the music that you like, or put it on your MySpace page or something, people could just come and grab this content, put it on their site, and the entire player was basically a giant YouTube ad. That's how we viewed it. That was our marketing budget. The clickable area to play the video in line was just the little play button in the middle, but the rest of the video would click back to our site. So little strategy.