The first video uploaded to YouTube is an 18-second clip titled ‘Me at the zoo,’ featuring co-founder Jawed Karim talking about elephants at the San Diego Zoo.

Three former PayPal employees named Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim started YouTube in February 2005. Before this site existed, sharing videos online was difficult and slow. Most people did not have the tools to post videos for others to see.Jawed Karim filmed the first video using a basic digital camera. He titled it 'Me at the zoo.' The video showed that anyone could share a moment from their life without needing expensive equipment or special skills. The founders built a video player that worked on many different computers and internet speeds.The website grew very fast. By December 2005, people were watching 8 million videos every day. Google bought YouTube for 1.65 billion dollars in October 2006. This happened only 20 months after the site launched.Today, users upload more than 500 hours of video every minute. The original zoo video is still online and has hundreds of millions of views. It remains a famous piece of internet history.