The 19-second clip was uploaded by YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim on April 23, 2005, and it was a simple video about his visit to the zoo.
The popularity of YouTube has grown immensely over the years. It is not just a video-sharing platform—it's also considered the second-largest search engine after Google. Expanding far past it's humble beginnings in 2005, Youtube is now home to billions of videos.
Youtube was created by former Paypal employees Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Jawed Karim. Karim was the first person to upload a video, which was a 19-second clip of him standing in front of several elephants at the San Diego Zoo.
Who knew that a short grainy quality video could be the start of a new internet revolution. It gave the people a platform to express themselves freely. The not-so-clear footage with a simple caption, "Me at the zoo," lacked in length and quality but at the same time, it had a charm of its own. The video was separated into three sections - “Intro,” “The Cool Thing,” and “End.”
In the clip, Karim starts “All right, so here we are, in front of the elephants.” After a brief introduction, Karim addresses the elephant in the room, quite literally, as he describes them, "The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks. And that's cool." After the brief explanation, he is seen looking back at the elephant enclosure and finishing the video with a simple line, “And that's pretty much all there is to say."
The brief clip was uploaded a month before the platform became public. The platform's beta version was released in May 2005 and attracted over 30,000 visitors per day. By December of that year, the platform attracted over two million video views each day, as per Britannica. After that, there was no going back. The number of visitors and the videos uploaded on the platform kept increasing.
Since its release, almost two decades ago, Jawed Karim's “Me at the zoo” has raked over 317 million views and 16 million likes. Since the video was shot in San Diego Zoo, the zoo's social media page (@sandiegozoo) expressed their happiness on being a part of the clip. Their comment read, "We're so honored that the first-ever YouTube video was filmed here!" Others were in awe of YouTube's growth.
As of today, the most streamed video on the platform is the iconic nursery rhyme "Baby Shark," which has been viewed 14 billion times - a record figure for the platform. Following the nursery rhyme is the pop hit "Despacito" sung by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, which has garnered 8 billion views, as per a report by Statista.
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