Apr 13
24
First YouTube Video is 8 Years Old Today
Jawed Karim and two other former PayPal employees named Chad Hurley and Steve Chen opened their new streaming video service YouTube for beta testing in May 2005. They spent the next six months bootstrapping their company as it grew by millions of new videos per day. In November 2005, Sequoia Capital invested $11.5 million. A year later, Google bought YouTube for $1.6 billion. That chain of events started eight years ago this week.
On April 23, 2005 the soon-to-be multimillionaire Karim uploaded the very first YouTube video titled, Me at the zoo. In it, he describes how cool it is that San Diego Zoo elephants have really, really, really long trunks. And that’s pretty much all there is to say…
.. except to note that Karim’s dumb video of himself appreciating the elephants is as significant as the first moving picture itself, . Interestingly, Me at the zoo is weirdly banal, just as the three second Roundhay film is however both are the first of things that absolutely changed the world.
Today, YouTube is the third most visited website after Google and Facebook. It serves over 4 billion videos each day and is among the premier platforms of digital communication. Eight years ago it was three ex-PayPal employees and footage of a pack of packin’ pachyderms.
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Jim Hedger
Jim Hedger is an organic SEO and digital marketing specialist. Jim has been involved in the online marketing industry since 1998 and a SEO since 1999. Best known as a broadcaster, interviewer, content writer and search industry commentator, Jim is a frequent conference speaker and organizer. He hosts the search focused radio show Webcology on WebmasterRadio.FM and is a WebmasterRadio.FM conference interviewer. Jim brings a wealth of knowledge, experience, passion and creative thinking to each project. Preferring a teamwork approach, Jim strives to inform and train his clients and their staff to run and maintain their own search and social media efforts.
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