On Sunday 17 years ago, a 25-year-old man named Jawed Karim uploaded his first video to YouTube, launching a service that has since become the go-to center for video streaming and providing anyone with cameras and video. Good ideas have a chance to make a living from their content.
The first video, I have to say, is nothing to write home about. A 19-second low-res clip (below) called i’m at the zoofeaturing Kareem, YouTube co-founder of the San Diego Zoo, who helpfully points out that elephants have very long trunks.
Like most videos that landed on streaming sites in the early days, the clip lacks the highly produced touches that feature in much of the content that floods the platform today.
“Okay, so we’re in front of the elephants,” Karim said to the camera in the first YouTube video. “The cool thing about these guys is that they have very, very, very long swim trunks, which is cool, that’s all there is to say.”
Of course, when he recorded and uploaded the clip, Kareem knew YouTube would continue to be the phenomenon it is today. Nor will his videos get hundreds of millions of views in the next few years.
A month after Karim’s video hit the site in April 2005, YouTube launched a public beta of the service before its official launch in November of that year. Around the same time, Karim left YouTube to pursue a master’s degree in computer science at Stanford University, but acquired shares worth tens of millions of dollars when Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006. Karim went on to co-found a joint venture fund called Youniversity Ventures (now YVentures), in which both Airbnb and Reddit benefited from the investment.
The creator of YouTube’s first video occasionally edits the clip’s description to express his opinion if the company makes changes to a platform he doesn’t like. Last year, for example, Karim criticized YouTube for removing counts that the public didn’t like.
As of April 2022, Elephant Clips has been viewed more than 228 million times and received more than 11 million comments. One person said recently: “To be honest, we’ll all be showing this to our kids someday.”
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