FILE-A man watches a clip on the popular video-sharing website YouTube. (Photo by AFP via Getty Images)
Nineteen years ago today, a young man posted the first-ever video on YouTube.
Jawed Karim published a video titled "Me at the Zoo" on April 23, 2005. The YouTube co-founder created it while standing in front of an elephant exhibit at the San Diego Zoo.
"All right, so here we are in front of the elephants," Karim says in the 19-second clip. "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."
Karim’s video was posted on YouTube a month before the social media platform's public launch in May 2005.
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The domain name YouTube.com, which eventually became the online video-sharing and social media platform, was registered on February 14, 2005.
YouTube was registered by Steve Chen, Chad Hurley, and Karim, three former employees of the American e-commerce company PayPal.
The group aspired to start a dating website but soon realized that individuals would enjoy sharing their home videos. A year later, Google bought YouTube.
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YouTube is headquartered in San Bruno, California, and has more than 2 billion users worldwide, with viewers watching more than 1 billion hours on average of YouTube content daily, according to the company’s website.
This story was reported from Washington D.C. FOX Television Stations national reporter Stephanie Weaver contributed to this report