How did YouTube acquired its first 10,000 users?

I remember the very early days of youtube. For the first 3 months, it was just a copycat of Flickr (concept, layout, tagclouds on the homepage etc.) with flash videos instead of photos. The initial idea was to offer a service where you could share your home videos with family and friends privately, with the possibility to make some of them public to anyone.

Youtube wasn't the only video sharing service on the net at that time, but the only one allowing copyrighted material.

So youtube quickly became an hub for tv shows and music videos and while everyone else was fighting against DMCA notices, RIAA and taking down content, no one at youtube seemed to care. That's how they've got their first 10k users.

As they've estabilished as no.1 video sharing website, Youtube started to take care of the legal implications.

sounds like a question for Quora...

I look forward to read the answer