The first video ever uploaded to YouTube is 19 seconds long. In it, a young man stands in front of the elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo and says, in full: “All right, so here we are in front of the, uh, elephants. And the cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long, um, trunks. And that’s, that’s cool. And that’s pretty much all there is to say.”
The man was Jawed Karim, one of YouTube’s three co-founders, and the date was April 23, 2005. The video, titled “Me at the zoo,” is still on his channel, with hundreds of millions of views.
A dating site that became something else
YouTube was founded in early 2005 by Karim, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, who had worked together at PayPal. The founders have said that early on they thought of it partly as a video dating site, before it became clear that people simply wanted to share any video they made. The site launched publicly later in 2005. Google bought it in 2006 for $1.65 billion in stock, a price many thought outrageous at the time.
Why the clip matters
“Me at the zoo” is unremarkable, which is exactly the point. It is a home video: shaky, unscripted, about nothing in particular. It captures the idea that made YouTube revolutionary, that anyone could publish video to the whole world without permission from a broadcaster.
An unlikely monument
Today, according to YouTube, people upload hundreds of hours of video to the site every minute. The first video’s comment section has become a kind of digital guestbook, where visitors leave notes about how far the platform has come. Karim has occasionally updated the video’s description to comment on YouTube’s policies, turning the original upload into a soapbox. Not bad for a few seconds about elephant trunks.
Sources: Me at the zoo, YouTube; Me at the zoo, Wikipedia; History of YouTube, Wikipedia.
