Washington: It was 10 years ago on this day, the global phenomenon – YouTube – was born, when Jawed Karim uploaded and starred in the first ever video on the file sharing website.
The then 25 year-old posted the 19-second clip titled “Me at the Zoo” on April 23, 2005, which was filmed at San Diego Zoo’s elephant enclosure.
‘Me at the zoo’ simply showed a man standing in front an elephant enclosure saying: “Alright so here we are in front of the elephants, and the cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long, trunks, and that’s cool. And that’s pretty much all there is to say.”
The unassuming video, in praise of elephants, marked the humble beginning of the third most-popular website on the planet.
Karim co-founded YouTube along with former PayPal employees, Chad Hurley and Steve Chen. A self-professed nerd, the Bangladeshi-German internet entrepreneur was credited with having created PayPal’s real-time anti-fraud system during his tenure with the company.
He became a millionaire after eBay purchased PayPal in 2002, but that was small change compared with the $64m cheque he received when Google acquired YouTube in 2006 for a whopping $1.65bn in stock.
Revolutionising modern life in myriad ways, today YouTube has 800m unique users a month and 300 hours of new videos are uploaded to the site every minute, three times more than in 201 4 with around three quarters of the material coming from outside the US.