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What was the first video uploaded to YouTube?
Co-founder Jawed Karim filmed it at the San Diego Zoo.
The clip is 19 seconds long. Karim stands in front of the elephant enclosure and remarks that the animals have very long trunks. It was uploaded on 23 April 2005, about two months after the site was registered on 14 February 2005, and it has since drawn hundreds of millions of views.
YouTube's three co-founders, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, had worked at PayPal. Karim's channel is named jawed, and the video was filmed by his friend Yakov Lapitsky. The site's public launch came later in 2005, and Google bought it in 2006 for about 1.65 billion US dollars in stock.
The video is often described as the most-watched mundane clip on the Internet. Its significance is mostly symbolic: it shows the modest, casual nature of early user-generated video and the format that came to dominate it. The video remains online on Karim's channel, and the brief and unscripted style reflects how little production the platform initially expected. Its tiny size also hints at the bandwidth of 2005: most home connections were slow, so short, low-resolution clips were the practical norm, and YouTube's early appeal lay in making them easy to embed and share rather than in image quality.