The 19-second clip was uploaded on April 23, 2005 by YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim.
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Jawed/YouTube
Jawed Karim
Nearly two decades ago, a grainy 19-second clip became the very first YouTube video.
What the video lacks in length and quality, it makes up for in charm—the same charm that helped the video-sharing platform grow into the social media powerhouse it is today.
The short clip is now divided into three sections: “Intro,” “The Cool Stuff,” and “End,” and was uploaded on April 23, 2005 by the then 25-year-old YouTube co-founder and software developer Jawed Karim.
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As the title “Me at the Zoo” suggests, the video shows Karim, now 44, in a zoo. More specifically, he is standing in front of several elephants at the San Diego Zoo.
“Okay, so here we are in front of the elephants,” the YouTube co-founder begins the video. “The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks. And that’s cool.”
And after taking another quick look at the elephant enclosure, Karim concludes: “And that’s basically all there is to say.”
“Me at the zoo” was uploaded a month before YouTube became publicly available in May 2025 and now has over 317 million views and 16 million likes.
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At that time, YouTube had about 30,000 visitors per day, according to Encyclopædia Britannica. When the platform officially launched on December 15, 2005, it was already recording over two million video views per day.
Co-founders Karim, Steve Chen and Chad Hurley – all early PayPal employees – eventually sold YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion in November 2006, according to the Encyclopædia Britannica.
According to the New York TimesKarim didn’t accept a salary, benefits, or even an official title when he founded YouTube. Instead, he went to Stanford to get a master’s degree in computer science with the goal of becoming a professor.
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Currently, the most viewed videos on YouTube – as of January 2024 – are not zoo clips, but music videos and catchy children’s songs, with “Baby Shark Dance” ranking number 1 according to Forbes India. The iconic earworm currently has over 14 billion views.
Second on the list is “Despacito” by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee with over eight billion views, followed by “Johny Johny Yes Papa,” “Bath Song,” and “Shape of You” by Ed Sheeran, each with over six billion views.
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