[imagesource:negativespace]

YouTube may now be the largest and most important long-form video-sharing site in the world, but those who recall its early days will remember it was once much smaller and just starting to gain attention.

Every app, service or website has to start somewhere, afterall, and YouTube had to be a blank page with no videos before people could start uploading to it. That is hard to imagine now that the site has over 14 billion uploaded videos making bank for various creators, bots and businesses.

That number allows more than one and a half videos for every person on the planet – and that’s counting strictly those that are publicly visible, by the way.

Besides the absolute hassle it takes to calculate how many videos are on the platform now – read The Atlantic‘s article ‘What We Discovered on ‘Deep YouTube’’ for more on that – someone somewhere pinpointed the exact video that was the very first ever uploaded to the platform, and fittingly enough it came from one of the site’s co-founders, Jawed Karim.

On 24 April 2005, he uploaded a 19-second clip of himself at the zoo, standing in front of an elephant enclosure.

The video, titled “Me at the Zoo”, doesn’t do much to bring any insights to the world but it since it was aimed at simply proving that the upload process worked, it was a success on those terms.

Since that day almost 20 years ago, millions and millions of people have found out that it’s the first YouTube video ever, making its view count pretty seismic.

At the time of writing, it’s racked up 323,122,112 views, which is somewhat massive, and despite never uploading again, Karim’s channel has also accrued 4.7 million subscribers, a number most YouTubers would dream of.

Given that adverts are the main source of revenue for YouTube channels, you might be wondering how much money this video actually made for Karim.

Well, no one really knows, since the video was uploaded before YouTube’s monetisation structure was in place and since its creator made his money in a more traditional way. As part of the YouTube founding team, albeit one without a title or salary, Karim walked away from the company with $64 million in shares, a sizeable slice of the pie that would apparently now be worth around $183 billion.

Now we’re talking about a large trunk.

This means he isn’t particularly reliant on the ad revenue from his single YouTube upload, despite its significant view count of over 321 million.

Amusingly, this video might not be the most charismatic, scripted, or inventive, but it serves as a perfect example of what YouTube promoted in its early years.

What may have begun as a simple video platform, has since evolved into a cornerstone of 21st-century communication.

[source:uniladtech]