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YouTube in a Museum
You can watch YouTube in a museum.
London’s Victoria and Albert Museum has a new exhibit featuring a reconstructed version of the YouTube page as it looked in 2005 and the first video posted to the platform.
YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim posted “Me at the zoo” on April 23, 2005. The 19-second clip features Karim talking about elephants at the San Diego Zoo.
Today, YouTube’s first upload has 383 million+ views
(Compare that to Baby Shark, which has more than 16 billion views.)
Museum curators say the video “marks an important moment in history of the internet and digital design.”
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YouTube’s influence in that realm has certainly expanded in the 20+ years since “Me at the zoo.”
YouTube was originally concepted as a dating site. It launched on Valentine’s Day, 2005. After five days, no one had uploaded a single video. (On average, there are over 20 million videos uploaded daily to YouTube today.)
So, the founders decided to pivot. The technology made it easy for anyone to upload videos, so Karim and company opened it up to any kind of content.
Flash forward a year — Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion in 2006. Flash forward 20 years – YouTube is the second-most visited website in the world. It’s the most-watched streaming platform, and sees more use on TVs than mobile devices.
Today, YouTube is seeing another major shift in its role on the web – AI search results.
YouTube is cited in nearly 30% of Google AI Overviews, and the platform recently surpassed Reddit as the most-cited social platform in AI-generated responses.
