When Was YouTube Created And What Was The First Video Ever Uploaded?

YouTube is celebrating its 20th anniversary today. It's quite surreal to see that a platform now home to over 20 trillion videos started with a 19-second clip. The first video uploaded to YouTube, which began as a dating site, was a 19-second clip recorded at the San Diego Zoo. The video, uploaded on April 23, 2025, shows co-founder Jawed Karim talking about elephants and their "cool" trunks. As a neat little homage, if you watch the video today, the timeline bar shows a celebration cake during the playback. 

The video was recorded by Karim's friend Yakov Lapitsky. "We met up to go to the San Diego Zoo and hung out when I was there for a conference," Lapitsky told Mashable. "He didn't really talk about his project at the time."

Its beginnings were rather humble — Karim later recalled that YouTube began with a single server rented at a $100 monthly fee — and in YouTube's brief dating era, out of desperation and needing to drive traffic, the founders turned to Craigslist and encouraged women to upload their videos in exchange for $20. "We didn't get a single reply," Karim said at a commencement ceremony in 2007. 

In the early days, users could not even pick which videos they wanted to play, as the website would randomly select one for them. But it emerged as a provocative platform that rose with "fail" videos and copyright-bell-ringing clips from popular TV content.

It didn't take long for YouTube to catch people's attention. Not only did it host videos, it made video playback and sharing far easier than other tech at the time. Its first big investment came from Keith Rabois, a PayPal alum who met Karim at a barbecue party, watched the entirety of YouTube's content — in roughly half an hour — and decided to put his money into the budding platform. "There were only two times I've done that," Rabois told Mashable. "The other was with Airbnb." 

In the early days, YouTube's nearly dozen employees worked from the office of another investor, Sequoia Capital, then shifted to their own space above a pizza shop. The latter was not a particularly snazzy setup. Christina Brodbeck, a YouTube designer, told Mashable it was infested with massive rats nearly as big as cats.

The platform's growth, however, became meteoric. Twenty years later, YouTube says it's home to trillions of videos, with nearly 20 million new clips uploaded to the platform each day. The platform logs 100 million comments daily, 10 million of them liked personally by creators. Talking about likes, the audience drops about 3.5 billion digital hearts each day on YouTube videos. And there are no less than 300 YouTube videos that have amassed a billion views each. (Bonus content: 12 YouTube features you'll kick yourself for not using and 5 things you didn't know you can do on the YouTube app.)