Watch the Very First YouTube Video, a Defining Moment in Internet History

Giv­en the dom­i­nance YouTube has achieved over large swaths of world cul­ture, we’d all expect to remem­ber the first video we watched there. Yet many or most of us don’t: rather, we sim­ply real­ized, one day in the mid-to-late two-thou­sands, that we’d devel­oped a dai­ly YouTube habit. Like as not, your own intro­duc­tion to the plat­form came through a video too triv­ial to make much of an impres­sion, assum­ing you could get it to load at all. (We for­get, in this age of instan­ta­neous stream­ing, how slow YouTube could be at first.) But per­haps the triv­i­al­i­ty was the point, a prece­dent set by the first YouTube video ever uploaded, “Me at the Zoo.”

“Alright, so here we are in front of the, uh, ele­phants,” says YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, stand­ing before those ani­mals’ enclo­sure at the San Diego Zoo. “The cool thing about these guys is that, is that they have real­ly, real­ly, real­ly long, um, trunks, and that’s, that’s cool. And that’s pret­ty much all there is to say.”

The run­time is 19 sec­onds. The upload date is April 24, 2005, two years before “Char­lie Bit My Fin­ger” and “Choco­late Rain,” four years before The Joe Rogan Expe­ri­ence, and sev­en years before “Gang­nam Style.” The pop-cul­tur­al force that is MrBeast, then a child known only as Jim­my Don­ald­son, would have been antic­i­pat­ing his sev­enth birth­day.

“After the zoo, the del­uge,” wrote Vir­ginia Hef­fer­nan in a 2009 New York Times piece on YouTube’s first four and a half years, when the site con­tained bare­ly any of the con­tent with which we asso­ciate it today. If you have a favorite YouTube chan­nel, it prob­a­bly did­n’t exist then. Hef­fer­nan approached the “fail,” “haul,” and “unbox­ing”  videos going viral at the time as new cul­tur­al forms, as indeed they were, but the con­ven­tions of the YouTube video as we now know them had yet to crys­tal­lize. Not every­one who saw the likes of “Me at the Zoo” would have under­stood the promise of YouTube. Per­haps it did­n’t feel par­tic­u­lar­ly rev­e­la­to­ry to be informed that ele­phants have trunks — but then, that’s still more infor­ma­tive than many of the count­less explain­er videos being uploaded as we speak.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Watch Hun­dreds of Free Movies on YouTube

The Very First Web­cam Was Invent­ed to Keep an Eye on a Cof­fee Pot at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty

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Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.