Today YouTube has videos on every topic you can think of. So what was the first frame of this giant archive? Not a music video, not an ad. A young man standing in front of the elephants at a zoo, and the only thing he says: elephants have really, really long trunks.
The video is called "Me at the zoo". It is 19 seconds long. And it has become one of the best-known home videos in internet history.
April 23, 2005, San Diego Zoo
YouTube was founded in February 2005 by three former PayPal employees: Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim. The domain youtube.com became active on February 14, 2005. The site was still a trial version and had nothing to show.
According to Wikipedia's article on the history of YouTube, the site's public beta also began on the same day, April 23, 2005. The slogan of those days was very different from the YouTube we know today: "Tune In, Hook Up". The site's first form felt less like a video sharing platform and more like a dating site with video.
The person who filled this void, with nothing on display, was Karim. On the evening of April 23, 2005, at 8:27 p.m. US West Coast time, he uploaded a video to his own channel. The person who shot the video was his high school friend Yakov Lapitsky. The location was San Diego Zoo, with two elephants in the background.
Karim turns to the camera and says the elephants have "really, really, really long" trunks, then adds that he has nothing else to say. The video ends. There's no planned promotion or script; it's exactly like an ordinary user's first attempt.
$1.65 billion in a year and a half
After this modest beginning, things moved at a dizzying pace. YouTube quickly became one of the most talked-about sites on the internet. On October 9, 2006, Google announced it would acquire YouTube. The price was $1.65 billion, to be paid not in cash but in Google stock.
Google's press release that day wrote that more than 100 million videos were being watched on YouTube every day. The time from the upload of the first video to the announcement of the acquisition was just a little over a year and a half.
| Then (2005) | Now |
|---|---|
| A single video: "Me at the zoo" | Countless channels and videos |
| A 19-second amateur shot | Professional broadcasts lasting hours |
| Almost no viewers | More than 395 million views (June 2026) |
The video is still up and still talking
"Me at the zoo" was never deleted or moved to an archive. It still sits on Karim's channel and, according to Wikipedia, had passed 395 million views as of June 2026.
Even more interesting, Karim has at times used this video's description as a kind of protest board. In 2013, when Google required a Google+ account for YouTube comments, Karim wrote in the description that he could no longer comment because he didn't want a Google+ account. In 2021 he updated the description again to criticize YouTube's decision to hide dislike counts.
In 2020 the official San Diego Zoo account left a comment on the video, and that comment was pinned. According to Wikipedia, on April 22, 2026 this pinned comment became the most-liked comment on the platform, with 4.5 million likes. So a 19-second elephant video is still breaking records twenty years later.
Why does it matter so much?
That the first video was uploaded by a founder is no coincidence either. The first content on an empty platform is often produced by the people who built it, because there is nobody else. Karim's aim was most likely not to create a masterpiece but to see that the system worked. The upload button worked, the video played, and the rest is history.
Technically the first video proved nothing. The image quality is low and the content ordinary. But that is exactly why it sums up the spirit of YouTube so well: anyone being able to show anything to the world without asking permission.
In February 2026 the Victoria and Albert Museum in London added this video to its collection, together with a recreated copy of YouTube's early web page. An amateur shot that once ended with "elephants have long trunks" is now kept as a digital artifact in a design and culture museum.
Do you think an ordinary video we upload today might be displayed in a museum twenty years from now?