YouTube’s first video, Me at the zoo, is uploaded
Jawed Karim uploaded Me at the zoo on 23 April 2005. Its brief elephant commentary became a memorable opening to a platform built around ordinary people making and sharing videos.
A remarkably ordinary beginning
On 23 April 2005, YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim uploaded Me at the zoo. He appears in front of an elephant enclosure at San Diego Zoo and remarks on the animals’ long trunks before ending his brief commentary. There is no elaborate introduction or grand explanation of the service. That everyday quality is central to its later appeal: the beginning of a major video platform survives as a small, informal moment rather than a polished corporate presentation. The original upload remains the primary audiovisual record.
A short clip and a large idea
YouTube’s tenth-birthday retrospective describes a nineteen-second clip and treats it as an expression of the platform’s premise: people could turn on a camera and share themselves. Some accounts round the running time to eighteen seconds, so the duration is best understood as approximate rather than a disputed event date. The documented upload day is 23 April. It should not be confused with the later public development and growth of the service, or with the date of a subsequent preserved webpage.
Preserving a changing digital object
In 2026, the Victoria and Albert Museum described its acquisition of the video and an early YouTube watch page. The preserved page dates from 8 December 2006, considerably later than the upload itself. The museum’s account distinguishes the original front-end code, the video file and period advertising. Reconstructing the page required work by curators, conservators, YouTube’s user-experience team and interaction designers. A functioning website is harder to preserve than a single static screenshot because its technology and behaviour change.
Why the modest scene matters
The clip became historically interesting through the platform that followed, but it also illustrates an important shift in who could publish moving images. Ordinary self-recording, interaction and sharing became central features of online culture. That does not make YouTube the first service ever to host video; the V&A explicitly places it among other platforms of its era. The illustration recalls the zoo setting and consumer-camera scale. It is an interpretive scene, not an extracted frame or evidence of the precise camera position used in the original recording.
Variation of Baby Elephant Walk — live at Advent Cafe
Buddy Case and friends
This live variation on Henry Mancini’s elephant-themed instrumental was performed at Advent Cafe in Conway, Arkansas, on 2 February 2001 and uploaded by Gary Alan Roberts. It is a thematic accompaniment to the zoo scene, not music in Karim’s original clip.
Listen on SoundCloud ↗Follow the evidence.
- YouTube: A to Z tenth-birthday account ↗
- V&A: Acquiring an early YouTube watch page and its first-ever video ↗
- Jawed Karim: Original Me at the zoo upload ↗
- Wikisource: Transcript of Me at the zoo ↗
- Gary Alan Roberts: Buddy Case and friends perform Baby Elephant Walk ↗
AI-assisted writing, with institutional and primary sources. Illustration is a reconstruction, not an archival photograph. Published October 31, 2026; updated October 31, 2026. Our approach
