YouTube was launched in February 2005. In the past decade and a half, YouTube has seen many highs and lows. Now, there are various videos on YouTube. Do you know what the first video uploaded on YouTube is? Let’s take a look.
The First Video on YouTube – Me at the Zoo
The first video on YouTube is Me at the Zoo. The video was uploaded to YouTube by Jawed Karim on April 24, 2005. As of July 10, 2020, more than 103 million viewers have watched it. But it is the only video on Karim’s channel.
This 18-second video was recorded by YAkov Lapitsky at the San Diego Zoo.
Jawed stood in front of a bunch of elephants and began to say “All right, so here we are in front of the elephants”.
Then he turned his head to look at the elephant and said “The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks, and that’s, that’s cool”.
Unlike many YouTube creators’ videos today, the first video on YouTube does not include what’s considered the more traditional sign off: “Subscribe to my channel!” or “Like, rate, comment!” At the end of the video, he just said “And that’s pretty much all there is to say.”
Let’s watch this video on YouTube. This video is not of high quality. But now, with the development of YouTube, the videos uploaded by YouTubers become clearer and clearer. If you want to know how to change the upload quality on YouTube, please read: How Do You Change the Upload Quality on YouTube?
The Creator of the First Video on YouTube – Jawed Karim.
Jawed Karim was born on October 28, 1979. He is not only an American software engineer and Internet entrepreneur of Bangladeshi-German descent, but also the co-founder of YouTube. When he was 26, he posted the first videos to YouTube.
During Karim’s time working at PayPal, where he met the fellow YouTube co-founders Steven Chen and Chad Hurley. He had designed many of the core components including its real-time anti-Internet-fraud system. They originally intended to make YouTube an already dating site, and then transformed to a vision for a platform that made online video more accessible and easier to share.
After co-founding the company with Chad Hurley and Steve Chen and developing YouTube concepts and websites, Karim became a graduate student in computer science at Stanford University and served as a YouTube consultant.
A year after Me at the zoo, Karim and fellow co-founders sold the platform to Google for a whopping $1.65 billion. Based on Google’s closing stock price at that time, Karim’s value was about $64 million.
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