The video is 19 seconds-long. It was filmed at the San Diego zoo and posted on April 23, 2005. It counts 355,472,332 views to date. It is obviously unpolished, raw even and could/should have been a precursor of the styling of video most creators are looking for today. The founder of YouTube, Jawed Karim, was not aiming at anything more back then, it was merely what he needed to launch his new video streaming site: YouTube.
“All right, so here we are in front of the elephants. The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long trunks, and that’s cool, and that’s pretty much all there is to say.”
Eighteen months later, Google acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion. Today YouTube generates more than $35 billion annually in ad revenue alone. Safe to say it was a good investment for Google.
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Despite having 5.34 million subscribers, Karim, who founded YouTube along with Chad Hurley and Steve Chen, has never uploaded another video to his channel. He has, however, occasionally changed the text in the description, his most recent update, made in the last few months, saying, “Microplastics are accumulating in human brains at an alarming rate,” along with a link to a video on the subject.