17 years ago on Sunday, a 25-year-old man named Jawed Karim uploaded the first video to the site, sparking a service that went on to become the go-to hub for video streaming and giving anyone with a camera and a good idea the chance to make a living out of
There was nothing to write home about in the first video. The 19-second clip, called Me at the Zoo, features a helpfully pointing out that elephants have long trunks.
Like most videos that landed on the streaming site in those early days, the clip lacks the highly produced touches that feature so heavily in much of the content that fills the platform today.
The cool thing about these guys is that they have really.
When he recorded and uploaded the clip, he knew that it would go on to become a phenomenon. His video would get hundreds of millions of views in the years that followed.
In April 2005, a month after the video hit the site, a public version of the service was launched. At the same time that he left YouTube to study for a master's degree in computer science at a university, he received shares worth tens of millions of dollars in the acquisition of the video-sharing website. YVentures is a venture fund co-found by Karim that helps people with investments.
If the company makes a change to the platform that he doesn't like, the creator of the first video on the site occasionally edits the description. Last year, for example, he criticized the removal of public dislike counts.
The elephant clip has been viewed more than 200 million times and received more than 11 million comments. We are all going to show our children this video one day, said a recent one.
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