The first YouTube video was published on the platform on April 23, 2005. An anniversary to celebrate because it was only the beginning of what would become A giant of the digital worldone of the most popular websites on the planet, in an aggregator of monumental multimedia content, in an essential social network and in a media giant.
The first YouTube video is a clip where the elephants of the San Diego Zoo are seen. Hard just 19 seconds and It was uploaded by one of the founders of YouTube, Jawed Karima German Software Engineer who created the company at age 25 with two colleagues (Steve Chen and Chad Hurley) with whom he had worked in Paypal. The service was officially launched to the public a few months later, on December 15, 2005.
The first YouTube video 20 years later
We do not believe that Jawed Karim (nor the other two founders) was aware of what the zoo video was going to mean. Beyond a granulated elephant clip, The ability to upload it to the Internet and was seen by anyone It was something revolutionary for the time. The success of the service was immediate and redefined the digital world dominated until then by the text and audio.
It did not go unnoticed because its traffic shot in a few months when users began placing YouTube links on the pages of the site that dominated the incipient social networks, MySpace. Only five months after its official launch, in May 2006, YouTube reached 2,000 million visualizations per day.
A few months later, on November 13, 2006, Google bought YouTube for 1,650 million dollars of the time. Seen today, a gift, since according to some analysts, YouTube would today be 550,000 million dollars as an independent business. The Internet giant saw its enormous potential and of course expanded its business model and initially financed it only with advertising. He also encouraged content creators to produce and raise exclusive content for the service and incorporated the Adsense program to increase income for them and the service itself.
The subsequent history is better known and, to summarize it, YouTube has become a giant. Despite the controversies with the great film and video producers for the always questioned copyright and the use of the algorithms that Google uses in all its services, the figures of the service are overwhelming.
YouTube is not only the first world video service, but one of the main world media. It is estimated to enter advertising and subscriptions More than 50,000 million dollars annuallyand it is expected that in 2025 it will exceed giants of the sector as Disney. It is also the second most popular website on the planet, only surpassed by its matrix, Google, and is the third website most visited by generation Z, after Instagram and Tiktok.
From the first YouTube video, users have uploaded More than 20 billion clips (including YouTube Music). Around 20 million videos a day are uploaded and 100 million comments and 3.5 billion “like” daily are recorded. Yeah; It all started with a (quite bad) video of some elephants. Happy birthday YouTube!
