In February 2025, YouTube turned 20. The video site has gone through a lot over the past two decades, including an acquisition, an earnings glow-up, and multiple generations of star creators. In our 20 Years of YouTube series, we’ll examine the uploads, trends, and influencers that have defined the world’s favorite video site — one year at a time. Click here for a full archive of the series.
Over a history that spans more than 100 years, the San Diego Zoo has made numerous media appearances. It served as a filming location for Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, provided the cover art for the Beach Boys’ album Pet Sounds, and showed up at the climax of the comedy classic Anchorman.
But for all of the San Diego Zoo’s memorable moments, its most significant contribution to pop culture may have been a 19-second video recorded in 2005. The facility’s elephant enclosure served as the filming location for “me at the zoo,” the first video ever uploaded to YouTube.
Subscribe for daily Tubefilter Top Stories
When it first hit YouTube on April 23, 2005, “me at the zoo” was little more than a test of the new platform’s technology. The star of the video, YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, seemed to choose a banal setting to avoid distracting from the video’s experimental purpose.
After two decades of twists and turns, Karim’s commentary outside the elephant enclosure has become the stuff of gospel. Some longtime YouTube viewers can recite the clip’s entire script, and it has become one of the most-watched non-music videos in YouTube history, with more than 354 million lifetime views.
Karim may not have predicted it at the time, but “me at the zoo” has come to epitomize several of YouTube’s core characteristics. It is often described as the platform’s first vlog, and it emphasized YouTube’s initial focus on short, user-generated videos.
“‘Me at the zoo’ was not a cinematic masterpiece,” Alex Pham wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 2010. “But as the first video uploaded to YouTube, it played a pivotal role in fundamentally altering how people consumed media and helped usher in a golden era of the 60-second video.”
These days, Karim’s magnum opus also reflects another aspect of YouTube’s homegrown culture: Its penchant for stirring up drama. The man who founded YouTube alongside Steve Chen and Chad Hurley occasionally updates “me at the zoo” to use the video as his soapbox for commenting on the latest platform-wide changes.
In 2013, Karim used his channel (which features no other videos) to criticize mandated Google+ integrations on YouTube. Nearly a decade later, he used the description box for “me at the zoo” to protest the removal of dislikes. At the time of this post, the “me at the zoo” description offers information about how “microplastics are accumulating in human brains at an alarming rate.”
20 years after “me at the zoo,” it doesn’t exactly resemble the typical YouTube video — at least not in the way it once did. Karim’s updates, however, still embody the spirit of the platform he launched. YouTube is a content platform, a cultural touchstone, and an entertainment phenomenon, but above all, it’s a hub filled with fierce discussion and debate. Maybe Karim will one day make good on his pledge to upload more videos alongside “me at the zoo.” Even if he doesn’t, the first contribution to the platform’s library will continue to speak loudly without saying many words at all.
