Nineteen Seconds That Started Everything: YouTube's First Video

The most consequential 19 seconds of video in history began with a young man, two elephants, and the most unremarkable sentence ever recorded.

"All right, so here we are in front of the elephants," Jawed Karim said into his high school friend Yakov Lapitsky's camera. "The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks, and that's cool, and that's pretty much all there is to say."

Karim uploaded the clip to a brand-new website called youtube.com on the evening of April 23, 2005. He called it "Me at the zoo." It was the first video ever uploaded to YouTube.

Karim knew something about the power of online video because he had felt its absence. A former PayPal employee, he and his fellow co-founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen had been inspired to build a video-sharing site partly because Karim had wanted to watch clips of the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show controversy and the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami — and could not find them anywhere online. Youtube.com had gone active that February; in April, he gave it its first video.

Nobody could have guessed what those 19 seconds started. Eighteen months later, Google bought the little startup for $1.65 billion. The clip has since been watched hundreds of millions of times — more than 433 million as of September 2026 — while YouTube grew into the world's largest video platform, with hundreds of hours of video uploaded every single minute.

In February 2026, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London acquired "Me at the zoo" for its permanent collection, treating a 19-second clip like a historical artifact. Curators worked with YouTube and the design studio oio on an eighteen-month reconstruction of the site's original 2005 watch page, using code preserved by the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine and the Adobe Flash player that ran it.

Karim, who has never uploaded another video to the channel — it remains his only one — has used the video's description over the years to make his feelings known, from protesting YouTube's removal of public dislike counts in 2021 to, in recent months, a note about microplastics accumulating in human brains. Fittingly, the San Diego Zoo's own pinned comment expressing pride in hosting the first-ever YouTube video became one of the most-liked comments on the entire platform.

Karim himself seemed to sense nothing grand that April evening. "That's pretty much all there is to say," he told the camera. It turned out to be the beginning of everything.

Photo: Bernard Gagnon, CC BY-SA 3.0 (via Wikimedia Commons).