Given the dominance YouTube has achieved over large swathes of world culture, we’d all expect to remember the first video we watched there. Yet many or most of us don’t: rather, we simply realized, one day in the mid-to-late two-thousands, that we’d developed a daily YouTube habit. Like as not, your own introduction to the platform came through a video too trivial to make much of an impression, assuming you could get it to load at all. (We forget, in this age of instantaneous streaming, how slow YouTube could be at first.) But perhaps the triviality was the point, a precedent set by the first YouTube video ever uploaded, “Me at the Zoo.”
“Alright, so here we are in front of the, uh, elephants,” says YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, standing before those animals’ enclosure at the San Diego Zoo. “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.”
The runtime is 19 seconds. The upload date is April 24, 2005, two years before “Charlie Bit My Finger” and “Chocolate Rain,” four years before The Joe Rogan Experience, and seven years before “Gangnam Style.” The pop-cultural force that is MrBeast, then a child known only as Jimmy Donaldson, would have been anticipating his seventh birthday.
“After the zoo, the deluge,” wrote Virginia Heffernan in a 2009 New York Times piece on YouTube’s first four and a half years, when the site contained barely any of the content with which we associate it today. If you have a favorite YouTube channel, it probably didn’t exist then. Heffernan approached the “fail,” “haul,” and “unboxing” videos going viral at the time as new cultural forms, as indeed they were, but the conventions of the YouTube video as we now know them had yet to crystallize. Not everyone who saw the likes of “Me at the Zoo” would have understood the promise of YouTube. Perhaps it didn’t feel particularly revelatory to be informed that elephants have trunks — but then, that’s still more informative than many of the countless explainer videos being uploaded as we speak.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
