You’re probably checking out the trailer of a new movie, or learning how to cook your favourite dish, or watching your favourite music video on YouTube today.
Now, take a moment to reflect on the fact that just over a decade ago you couldn’t have done any of this. Because YouTube didn’t exist.
It’s been 10 years exactly since the first clip was uploaded on the brand new YouTube. On April 23, 2005, co-founder Jawed Karim – username, ‘jawed’ – uploaded the very first YouTube video, titled, “Me at the zoo.”
Yesterday, to celebrate completing 10 years, YouTube shared the video on its Facebook account, using the hashtag #TBT (Throwback Thursday). And once again, it’s gone viral.
At the time of writing this, it had more than 20 million views.
The 18-second clip shows Karim standing in front of a bunch of elephants in San Diego Zoo and talking about, well, elephants.
“The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks, and that’s, that’s cool. And that’s pretty much all there is to say,” he says in the video.
Karim founded the video-sharing site with Steve Chen and Chad Hurley in February and its public beta launch took place in May, 2005. Karim’s video was watched and re-watched several times then.
