Me at the zoo
first video uploaded to YouTube
"Me at the zoo" is a YouTube video uploaded on April 23, 2005, recognized as the first video uploaded to the platform. The 19-second video features Jawed Karim, one of the co-founders of YouTube, being recorded by his high school friend, Yakov Lapitsky. In the video, Karim is seen standing in front of two elephants at the San Diego Zoo in California, where he briefly comments on the length of their trunks.
Multiple journalists have opined that the video represented YouTube as a whole and stated it was a milestone of the platform's history. Karim has later updated the video's description several times. As of September 2026, the video has received more than 433 million views.
Background
YouTube was founded in 2005 by three former PayPal employees – Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim. Hurley studied design at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, while Chen studied computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Karim stated that inspiration for the platform came from the Super Bowl XXXVIII halftime show controversy and the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami. He was unable to find video clips of these events online, which gave him the idea to start a video-sharing website.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Me at the zoo” as first video uploaded to YouTube. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as first video uploaded to YouTube. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6803111. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2005, 2026 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “Me at the zoo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.