Answer: A Visit To The Zoo

The very first video uploaded to YouTube, all the way back in April of 2005, was a simple 18 second video of YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim visiting the San Diego Zoo. The video is notable entirely for the fact that it was the first video uploaded to YouTube and otherwise is, now, one of millions of goofy, meandering, and potentially endearing videos on the gigantic video sharing website. Karim, standing in front of the old elephant exhibit, says:

“All right, so here we are in front of the, uh, elephants, and the cool thing about these guys is that, is that they have really, really, really long, um, trunks, and that’s, that’s cool, and that’s pretty much all there is to say.”

Some sentiments are timeless. Elephants and their really, really, really long trunks (as well as their other wildlife and zoo brethren) are still pretty cool and still rack up views on YouTube. Since it was published, that first video has received over 140,000,000 views over the years and YouTube has gone on to become the most popular video sharing service on the internet with over 500 hours of video uploaded every minute of every day (as of May 2019).