What do you think of this fact?
Today YouTube is full of music videos, tutorials, livestreams and video essays longer than feature films. But it all started with a clip shorter than most commercials.
19 seconds of history
On April 23, 2005, Jawed Karim, one of YouTube’s three founders, uploaded the platform’s first video. Title: “Me at the zoo.” Length: 19 seconds.
It shows Karim at the San Diego Zoo with two elephants behind him. He says: “Alright, 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 trunks.” Not much else happens. No editing, no intro, no “smash that subscribe button.”
Who filmed it, who founded it
The camera was in the hands of Karim’s high school friend Yakov Lapitsky. According to TIME, he later became a professor of chemical and environmental engineering at the University of Toledo. Not your typical camera operator résumé.
YouTube itself was founded in 2005 by Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, who had all worked at PayPal before.
From test clip to cultural artifact
The video is still online. According to Wikipedia, it now has more than 400 million views. Business Insider even named it the most important YouTube video of all time. Not because of the elephants, but because it shows how unremarkably a revolution can begin.
The San Diego Zoo commented on the video itself in 2020. According to Wikipedia, that became the most-liked comment on the entire platform.
Countless hours of content later, YouTube’s first big insight still holds up: elephants really do have very long trunks.