Me at the Zoo: Happy Birthday, Youtube
One man, a few elephants, 44 words. Jawed Karim made internet history exactly 15 years ago. Because Jawed Karim is on camera in the first YouTube video in history.
The following 18 seconds made history.
"Me at the Zoo" is the first video ever uploaded to YouTube. Exactly 15 years ago on 24 April 2005 at 20:31 local time.
A story of trunks
The content of the video is ambiguous. Perhaps. Is the trunk really a penis joke? Because the 44 words, one of which is an "er", one of which is an "um", two of which are a slip of the tongue and three of which are the word "really", leave plenty of room for interpretation.
All right, so here we are in front of the, uh, elephants, and 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.
Post production? Good sound? Production value? The duo Jawed Karim in front of the camera and Yakov Lapitsky as cameraman probably didn't even think about that at the time.
In the course of YouTube's 15-year history, many critics have analysed the history, background and significance of the video. In his monograph "Authenticity and How We Fake It: Belief and Subjectivity in Reality TV, Facebook and YouTube", Aaron Duplantier, professor at Syracuse University, describes what he sees in the video.
This was clever marketing, no doubt, because Karim appeared not to be overtly
Jawed and Yakov have thus set the tone for the "broadcasters of tomorrow", i.e. the users, writes journalist Drake Baer in the industry magazine Business Insider in research with the virality consultant Brendan Gahan. "Me at the zoo" is therefore the most important video on YouTube. Ever.
It's amazing how unassuming the first video on Youtube is. In a lot of ways it's representative of Youtube - it doesn't need to be this fancy production; it can be approachable. The first Youtube video is something anyone could create on their own.
Others suspect tested footage in the clip. Jawed Karim and Yakov Lapitsky were at the San Diego Zoo, had a camera with them and needed a few seconds of video for a system test.
Yawed Karim? Who is that?
Jawed Karim is an academic. Born in East Germany to a man from Bangladesh and a woman from Germany, he gained his education internationally. Before working on YouTube, he was a software architect at Paypal. When YouTube was sold to Google in 2007, the then 28-year-old received shares worth almost 140 million US dollars.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
With the money, he withdrew from the public eye. He founded his own investment company, which is now known as Y Ventures. The company invests in student projects, start-ups and internet companies. Its successes include AirBnB and Reddit.
Journalist. Author. Hacker. A storyteller searching for boundaries, secrets and taboos – putting the world to paper. Not because I can but because I can’t not.