There were several factors that contributed to YouTube becoming the #1 video sharing service on the web. But a lot of initial adoption was driven by the fact that it had pirated content hosted on it. If you wanted to watch the latest episode of Lost for free, YouTube was your best bet: no queued downloading through torrents, just stream it from the server. Kim Dotcom noted how pirated content was driving YouTube’s adoption and figured that seeding some of that could unlock traffic for MegaUpload. It definitely worked. But playing with pirated content, somebody was bound to get burnt. MegaUpload went under when it was alleged that the pirated content was, unlike the YouTube case, a deliberate part of the platform’s strategy.

Link ~> https://medium.com/@sanguit/how-paypal-and-reddit-faked-their-way-to-traction-9411fb583205