Today, there are more than 14 billion videos on YouTube. Nearly four million new videos are uploaded daily. While YouTube is now a ubiquitous social media and video-sharing platform, it was once new. On April 23, 2005, the very first YouTube video was uploaded. The person who made this video became the first YouTuber.
Me at the Zoo
In February 2005, the “YouTube.com” domain name was activated. Two months later, video uploading functionality was added to the website. YouTube’s inaugural video was “Me at the Zoo”, which was uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim. By uploading this video, Karim became the first YouTuber.
“Me at the Zoo” became highly popular and has been viewed more than 300 million times. It’s a short, 19-second video that features Karim standing in front of a couple of elephants. He says, in front of the elephants, “The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long, um, trunks. And that’s, that’s cool.” The full video was filmed at the San Diego Zoo, California. During the video, Jawed Karim mentions that the elephants have long trunks. To this day, this is the only video on Karim’s channel.
You can watch the first-ever YouTube video here:
YouTube Co-Founder Jawed Karim
Jawed Karim is an American internet entrepreneur and software engineer. After Karim graduated from the University of Illinois, he started working at PayPal. During his time at PayPal, Karim met Steve Chen and Chad Hurley, his fellow co-founders of YouTube. They would work on YouTube for several years before it was officially launched in 2005. Jawed Karim developed many aspects of YouTube, which include the site’s anti-fraud system that monitors everything in real-time.
Life After YouTube
After becoming the first YouTuber with the April 23, 2005 upload of “Me at the Zoo’, Jawed Karim would go on to be an advisor to the video-sharing platform as he attended Stanford University. When the site was made in February 2005, Karim decided that he would focus on his studies instead of being a full-time YouTube employee. Because of this agreement, Karim took a significantly lower share of the platform than Chen and Hurley.
When Google bought YouTube in 2006, Karim received more than 137,000 shares of stock, which was worth about $64 million at the time. Over the years, Jawed Karim has maintained his YouTube channel, which he has used to make periodic updates to the description under “Me at the Zoo”. He made these updates to publicly criticize some of the changes Google has introduced to the platform, including the removal of dislikes from videos in 2021. Today, Jawed Karim has a net worth of over $300 million.
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