London's V&A Buys The First-Ever Video Uploaded to YouTube
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YouTube went live on 23 April 2005. Now, the Victoria and Albert Museum in London has acquired the site’s very first video. Want to watch the clip that started it all?
Titled Me at the Zoo, the rather innocuous video was uploaded by YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, after a visit to the San Diego Zoo. In the 19-second clip, Karim is seen discussing elephants.
But, fast forward to today, V&A curators and conservators have been working with YouTube and the interaction design studio oio for the past 18 months to reconstruct the site’s early interface, according to a statement from the museum. They used code that had been captured by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (quite probably the most under-rated library in the world, in San Francisco), which preserves archived versions of websites.
“By reconstructing the original 2005 watchpage, we aren’t just showing a video; we are inviting the public to step back in time to the beginning of a global, cultural phenomenon,” YouTube CEO Neal Mohan tells PA Media.
The reconstruction process involved a meticulous process. The first was the original front-end code captured by the Internet Archive on 8 December 2006 - which is “the oldest timestamp documented online,” says a V&A spokesperson - along with the video player that ran on Adobe Flash Player. The second piece of the puzzle was the video file itself. Finally, the team even preserved banner ads for YouTube that appeared on the page between December 2006 and January 2007.
“The ability to work with YouTube to bring the early watch page into the collection has enabled us to forge new ground in how we collect and preserve complex digital objects for the future,” says Corinna Gardner, the senior curator of design and digital at the V&A, in a statement from the Museums Association.
In late 2006, Google purchased the site for $1.6 billion. And today, "YouTube is one of - if not the - most-used of all digital offerings, with over 70 percent of international consumers using it weekly, and over 50 percent using it daily," says Midia Research. YouTube achieved more than $60bn in revenue in 2025.
So, without further ado, here's the video...