First YouTube video appeared online 15 years ago

It has been fifteen years since the first video appeared on YouTube. The first video is called Me at the zoo and was put on the platform by Jawed Karim, one of the founders of YouTube.

The video Me at the Zoo is still online and has more than 91 million views. This is an 18-second clip of Karim’s visit to the San Diego Zoo. The video was added to the video platform on April 23, 2005.

At the beginning of 2005, the three founders of YouTube, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, got the idea to start their own video platform. The domain name was registered on February 14, 2005. By the way, the site didn’t open to the public as a beta until May 2005, so Karim’s zoo clip wasn’t publicly visible for the first few days. In December 2005, the official introduction of YouTube took place. The site already had millions of users at the time. A year later, the video platform was acquired by Google for $1.65 billion.

There are different stories about the founding of YouTube. According to Time, the idea arose when Hurley and Chen struggled to share a shot video online after a dinner party in early 2005. However, Karim said in 2007 that the original idea was to create a dating site with videos. “We even had a slogan: Tune in, hook up,” Karim said. Since they didn’t have any dating videos yet, Karim posted some airplane clips on the site in addition to his zoo visit. Because users didn’t post dating videos even for a fee, but more and more generic videos appeared, the three rebuilt the site in June 2005 to make the platform more open and common.

Early version from YouTube, page by Jawed Karim. source: Vice