The first video in YouTube history turns 20; check it out

YouTube celebrated its 20th anniversary last Wednesday (23), and along with it, the first video ever posted on the platform is also celebrating its anniversary.

The 19-second clip titled “Me at the zoo” features a young Jawed Karim, one of the site’s co-founders, during a visit he made years earlier to the San Diego Zoo in the United States.

“Alright, so here we are in front of the elephants. The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks. And that’s basically all there is to say,” Jawed says in the short clip.

The video was filmed by Yakov Lapitsky, a friend of Jawed’s at the time. The video, which is the only one on his channel, has accumulated over 355 million views since its posting on April 24, 2005.

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Although he hasn’t posted any other videos on his channel, Jawed used the description field to give opinions on various topics, including the removal of the dislike button in 2021 and the mandatory use of Google+ to comment on videos in 2013.

YouTube was founded in 2005 after the trio consisting of Jawed, Chad Hurley, and Steve Chen registered the youtube.com domain. Just over a year later, Google bought the site for $1.65 billion.

Photo and video: YouTube @jawed. This content was created with the help of AI and reviewed by the editorial team.