15 years of YouTube: This is the first video, watch it here

It has been fifteen years since the first video appeared on YouTube. The first video is called ‘Me at the zoo’ and was put on the platform by Jawed Karim, one of the founders of YouTube.

The video ‘Me at the Zoo’ is still online and now has more than 91 million views. It is an 18-second clip of Karim’s visit to the San Diego Zoo. The video was added to the video platform – YouTube – on April 23, 2005.

The three YouTube founders, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim, got the idea in early 2005 to start their video platform.

The domain name was registered on February 14, 2005. The site only opened as a beta to the public in May 2005, so Karim’s zoo clip has not been publicly visible for the first few days.

The official launch of YouTube took place in December 2005. The site already had millions of users. A year later, the video platform was acquired by Google for $ 1.65 billion.

Dating site

There are various stories about the creation of YouTube. According to Time, the idea came up when Hurley and Chen struggled to share a shot video online in early 2005 after dinner.

However, Karim said in 2007 that the original idea was to create a dating site with videos. “We even had a slogan: Tune in, hook up,” said Karim.

Since they didn’t have dating videos yet, Karim posted some airplane clips on the site in addition to his zoo visit.

Since users did not even post dating videos for a fee, but more and more general videos appeared, the three converted the site in June 2005 to make the platform open and more widespread.

YouTube is now the largest video site in the world, with about 2 billion users. The site is available in 91 countries in 80 different languages.

A lot of money is made via the video platform: the ‘richest’ YouTuber earns about 22 million a year, only from advertising income.

The music industry is also benefiting: 93 percent of the most viewed videos are music videos.