According to an interview with Max Goldberg, he purchased the domain name yourethemannowdog.com after seeing the commercial for Finding Forrester. He didn't know what to do with it, so he created the YTMND image and sound loop as a placeholder. For two years, he never promoted the site, but others found it through search engines and were moved to create variations of it. In April 2004, Goldberg created YTMND.com as a database and web hosting center for them, and it took off as a fad.[2]
When YTMND first opened, newly created YTMNDs were unmoderated and therefore a certain portion of them were highly offensive. The site also featured forums but on October 14th, 2004, Max Goldberg, without any warning, inexplicably shut down the YTMND Forums and banned the chief users, citing tension between himself and the website's host—though they have since reopened. The site as a whole was temporarily closed in December 2004, with Goldberg forwarding the site to the original yourethemannowdog.com without notice.
It was open again for a short while in January 2005, and in late March 2005 Goldberg reopened the site with a number of new features including the moderation of YTMNDs. In October 2005 a stricter moderation system went into effect which deleted many YTMNDs and added user age verification (through a new site called ytmnsfw.com) before displaying any offensive or unmoderated YTMNDs. On November 26th 2005, as part of Max's campaign to update the look and functionality of ytmnd, YTMND radio was started.
On November 25, 2005 YTMND relaunched on new servers, sporting an entirely redesigned layout [3]. Updates included user names in the URL, as opposed to numbers which had previously been the norm; faster caching and new content boxes, with the promise of more features to come soon.
