April 23, 2005

Me at the zoo

Jawed Karim uploads YouTube's first video, “Me at the zoo”

The first thing ever posted to YouTube is one unedited shot of a founder observing that elephants have long trunks, then saying that's pretty much all there is to say.

Nineteen seconds at the elephant exhibit

YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim uploaded “Me at the zoo” on Saturday, 23 April 2005, under the account name “jawed.”

The clip shows him at the San Diego Zoo's elephant exhibit describing the elephants' long trunks. It runs 19 seconds in YouTube and Victoria and Albert Museum descriptions, though some YouTube retrospectives round it to 18.

Karim's high-school friend Yakov Lapitsky filmed it after Karim handed him a point-and-shoot camera at the exhibit.

Two dates for one upload

The historically documented upload time is 8:27 p.m. Pacific daylight time. Locally that was 23 April; in UTC it was already 24 April.

Current YouTube metadata exposes the date rather than that original local timestamp.

The site was still private or pre-public-beta when the clip went up; YouTube's own history places the wider beta in May 2005.

What the origin story does not settle

The founding anecdote is usually told as fact, and the founders disagreed about it. Karim associated the idea with difficulty finding Super Bowl and Indian Ocean tsunami footage, while Chad Hurley and Steve Chen gave a competing dinner-party account; contemporary reporting records the disagreement.

YouTube and the V&A identify all three — Karim, Hurley and Chen — as founders.

The title is capitalized “Me at the zoo,” and on that evening the clip's function was a test and demonstration of a still-obscure service.

Sources

Researched 24 Aug 2026 9 sources not yet audited

How this was checked

Researched from the web into a fact sheet and rewritten from that sheet. This article has not yet had an independent model audit. How the pipeline works →

What the sources leave uncertain

The accepted date is 23 April in Pacific daylight time. The upload was late enough that its UTC date was 24 April.
The historically displayed description gave 8:27 p.m., but current YouTube metadata exposes the date rather than that original local timestamp.
Sources describe the runtime as either 18 or 19 seconds, apparently because of player and rounding conventions. The current standard description is 19 seconds.