In today’s times, the word “YouTube” and its logo are familiar to virtually every person over the age of two. The multibillion dollar platform boasts billions of users around the world and is the ultimate place for sharing videos of everything from informative deep dives to silly clips to the major movie trailers. YouTube’s impact on pop culture and entertainment is immeasurable as a platform that has shaped internet trends, transformed how we consume news and seek knowledge, and, for some, led to international fame. It feels like YouTube has been around for many, many decades. In reality, the social website launched in 2005 with a surprisingly brief and simple yet impactful video. Let’s dive into the brief history of the first and oldest YouTube video in existence and how it shaped the website’s future.
YouTube’s Strange Origin Story
Before YouTube ever got its domain name, much less its first video upload, it was just a random idea from three smart guys. YouTube’s founders Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim were all early PayPal employees who wanted to start a company after eBay bought out their employer. According to Karim, the inspiration for YouTube stemmed from the infamous 2004 Super Bowl incident where Janet Jackson’s breast was briefly exposed by Justin Timberlake during the halftime show.
Karim said it was hard to find video of that very widely seen moment as well as other major news stories like the 2004 Indian Ocean Tsunami. We don’t know why those two very different incidents stood out to him. But we do know that there wasn’t really a place for video clips of big moments that people could access on demand.
Chen and Hurley claimed the original vision for the website was to be a video dating service akin to the website Hot or Not. Fortunately and unsurprisingly, that idea went nowhere after attempts to find attractive women to submit videos in exchange for payment did not go well. They then decided to make the platform one where users could upload any type of video. What a weird start to the website, indeed. Either way, after some venture capital funding, they formed a very modest headquarters in San Mateo, CA. The website “youtube.com” became active in February 2005 and the first video hit the website in April.
What Is the First and Oldest YouTube Video?
The first YouTube video, published on April 23, 2005, is a 19-second clip called “Me at the zoo.” The “me” in question is YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, who is seen in front of an elephant exhibit giving commentary about the animal’s trunks. The “Me at the zoo” video, filmed by Karim’s friend Yakov Lapitsky, laid the foundation for what YouTube would soon become. Karim’s commentary clearly isn’t very in-depth. However, it is the epitome of user-created, amateur content that allows the creator to craft a specific narrative and become the purveyor of reporting. He is, indeed, the first YouTuber.
The direct engagement with the camera—a portal to an unseen audience—and very matter-of-fact and slice of life approach is the formula that many users tap into and build on with more refined aesthetics decades later. And, for Gen Xers and Millennials, this clip and its grainy appearance drums up nostalgia for simpler social media times. Remember those good fun party times before everything was about careful curation for clicks, engagement, and a potential payday? It was a place to transfer the commentary and opinions from places like LiveJournal and put it into video form to share with others.
“Me at the zoo” is the first and oldest clip, but it isn’t the most viewed YouTube video. Still, it is no slouch with 346 million views as of January 2025. (Interestingly, it is the only video under Karim’s account. His other videos are no longer available for unknown reasons.) But the San Diego Zoo’s pinned comment on the clip expressing its pride in being a part of the first-ever YouTube video is the most liked one on the platform with 4 million and counting. People continue to add to well over 10 million comments—almost on a daily basis!—to talk about the video’s impact on the world wide web.
Jawed Karim’s Life After Posting the First and Oldest YouTube Video “Me at the Zoo”
From the beginning of YouTube, Jawed Karim didn’t want to be an employee of the company. He instead wanted to focus on school at Stanford University as a computer science graduate student. So, he became an adviser instead and took a lower share of the company compared to the other co-founders. That lower share is nothing to snuff at considering he got over 137K shares of stock when Google bought the company in 2006, which equaled about $64 million dollars. He went on to launch a venture fund company that invested in Airbnb, Reddit, and Eventbrite, among others. Basically, he’s really, really rich and appears to mind his business, which is what we love to hear.
Karim doesn’t post videos on YouTube, but he does use “Me at the zoo” to criticize the platform that he helped found via its video description. In 2013, he changed the video description to “I can’t comment here anymore, since i don’t want a Google+ account.” Later on, in 2021, Karim did the same thing when dislikes went away on YouTube with a description saying “”When every YouTuber agrees that removing dislikes is a stupid idea, it probably is. Try again, YouTube.” For now, the video’s description is simply three short timestamps—Intro, The Cool Thing, and End.
Of course, YouTube’s history is riddled with controversies and criticisms, from privacy issues to promotion of harmful conspiracy theories and many things in between. But, we cannot deny that it is a vital part of our experience as internet users and creatives. We go to YouTube to learn new skills, to search for trailers, to check in with our fave YouTubers or to simply go down a rabbit hole of strange and comforting videos to escape the world. None of this would be possible and our world wouldn’t be the same without a quick video clip of a YouTube founder having a random day at the zoo.
