Twenty years since the first YouTube video. How did it all begin?
Twenty years ago, on April 23, 2005, the first video was uploaded to YouTube - a simple 18-second video called Me at the Zoo.
According to Android Authority, this video has now garnered more than 355 million views and has become a symbol of the humble beginnings from which the world's largest video platform grew.
A historic video shot by YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim marked the beginning of a huge journey for the platform. In the video, he simply talks about elephants at the San Diego Zoo, saying, "The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks." Karim, without realizing it, was making internet history, and this video became a symbol of the birth of YouTube and the beginning of the era of video content.
"Two decades after Jawed uploaded the first YouTube video, the platform remains an ever-evolving beast. What started with one man and a couple of elephants now amounts to over 500 hours of content uploaded every minute! Actually, we’re pretty sure the number is higher, and YouTube just hasn’t updated its stats in a while. In 2025, content on YouTube includes everything from personal vlogs to billion-view music videos, live streams, podcasts, documentaries, Shorts, and now, even AI-generated videos! A 25-year-old Jawed would certainly not have imagined this!" the publication noted.
Read also: YouTube improves Shorts editor and adds new features
To celebrate the anniversary, YouTube added a cake slider and an elephant icon to the first video, which links to Karim's channel, which has one video but over 5 million subscribers.
Background: Jawed Karim is an American entrepreneur and one of the founders of YouTube. He was born on October 28, 1979 in Merseburg, then part of East Germany (GDR). He moved with his family to Germany at an early age and grew up in Neuss. In 1992, his family moved to the United States, where Karim graduated from Minnesota Central High School and attended the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Due to his minor role in YouTube, Karim was largely unknown to the public as the third founder until the service was acquired by Google in 2006. Despite his smaller stake in the company, the purchase was still large enough to give him 137,443 shares, worth about $64 million. Javed Karim contributed to the creation of PayPal's payment services, and is therefore considered a member of the so-called "PayPal mafia" - an informal association of investors and entrepreneurs who worked at PayPal before its purchase by EBay in 2002.
As we'll recall, YouTube recently announced a new tool called "Music Assistant," which will allow content creators to generate background music for videos using artificial intelligence. The new feature is available on the Creator Music platform, where users can enter text queries or specify desired instruments, mood, or video type in the "Music Assistant" tab. Based on these queries, artificial intelligence creates several options for free tracks that can be downloaded and used in videos. The feature is gradually being introduced among creators who have access to Creator Music as part of the YouTube Partner Program.