YouTube celebrates its 17th anniversary, what is the very first video posted on the platform?

YouTube celebrated its 17th candle on Saturday. The opportunity to do a retrospective and to dive back into the history of the platform. Precisely, the first video published on YouTube is still accessible, reports Frandroid.

Entitled “Me at the zoo”, this video which lasts a total of 18 seconds was posted precisely on April 24, 2005. In total, the video has been viewed nearly 229 million times and liked by eleven million people.

A historical video

In these images shot in San Diego (United States), we see a young man presenting a zoo and more particularly the trunks of the elephants behind him. Contrary to what we can see today on the platform, the definition is limited to 240p and the title is not really optimized for SEO. Despite this, the video is historic and will forever remain the first published on this service that has become essential on the Internet.

At that time, YouTube was not yet owned by Google, the service having been founded by an independent start-up. But a little over a year after its launch, in October 2006, the platform was bought by the Mountain View company for the sum of 1.65 billion dollars. After 17 years of existence, YouTube has managed to keep its great principle intact until today: allow everyone to post content for free.