The clip is only 18 seconds long, but 15 years ago it triggered an online video revolution. Thursday is the 15th anniversary of the first YouTube video in which the company’s co-founder, Jawed Karim, stands in front of an elephant enclosure at the San Diego Zoo.
It’s not the most impressive video ever.
“Well, here we are in front of the elephants, and the cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long, um, trunks,” says Karim. “And that’s cool. And that’s pretty much all there is to say.”
Maybe simple and to the point, and the historical video has been viewed more than 90 million times. Of course, that’s nothing compared to the site’s top videos. The most viewed offer, the 2017 music video for Luis Fonsi’s song Despacito, has been viewed more than 6.7 billion times.
Karim founded YouTube together with Steven Chen and Chad Hurley, who were all former PayPal employees. He is said in the past That part of the inspiration for the website came when he missed Janet Jackson’s famous wardrobe malfunction at the 2004 Super Bowl and couldn’t find an online video of the blunder. Just a year after creating the 2005 zoo video, Karim and his co-founders of YouTube sold the platform to Google for $ 1.65 billion.
According to Business statisticsMore than 2 billion registered users visit YouTube every month, and people watch over 1 billion hours of video every day.
The zoo video remains the only video it runs on Karim’s YouTube channel, However, one message says: “Update video as soon as 10 million subscribers!” If that’s actually Karim’s plan, he doesn’t have to hurry. His channel currently has only 793,000 subscribers. In comparison Swedish YouTubers PewDiePie has more than 104 million.