The First Video Is Uploaded to YouTube

On April 23, 2005, an unpolished nineteen-second video titled "Me at the zoo" was published online. Uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim and showing him in front of the elephants at the San Diego Zoo, it was the very first clip on YouTube. Earlier that year, on February 14, Karim and fellow former PayPal employees Chad Hurley and Steve Chen had activated the domain name YouTube.com. The startup later worked out of a modest office above a pizzeria in San Mateo, California, and opened the site to the public as a beta in May 2005.

The founders later presented contrasting accounts of the platform's initial conception. A popular story repeated in the media traced the idea to a dinner party where the founders struggled to share videos, while Karim pointed instead to how hard it was to find video clips of major news events online. Another account holds that YouTube began as a video dating site with the slogan "Tune In, Hook Up," and that the founders broadened it into a general video-sharing service when it failed to attract enough users.