The First Year of YouTube: From "Me at the Zoo" to $1.65 Billion
YouTube started as a dating site idea in an office above a pizzeria. Eighteen months later, Google bought it.
By the InterStalgia history desk · November 14, 2026
In 2005 putting a video online was a chore. You needed the right file format, somewhere to host it, and viewers who had the right player installed. Three former PayPal employees, Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Jawed Karim, thought there should be an easier way.
Tune in, hook up
The domain youtube.com was activated on February 14, 2005, Valentine's Day, which fits, because the first idea was a video dating site with the slogan "Tune In, Hook Up." The dating part didn't take off. The video part did. The founders noticed how hard it was to find clips of things everybody was talking about, like the Janet Jackson Super Bowl halftime show the year before, and they dropped the dating idea to build a place where anyone could upload a video and anyone could watch it in a normal web browser.
Each founder had a job. Hurley studied design and made the logo and the look of the site. Chen made sure uploading and playback actually worked. Karim, a programmer, helped with both. Their first headquarters was an office above a pizzeria and a Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California.
Me at the zoo
On April 23, 2005, Karim uploaded the first video. It is 19 seconds long, filmed at the San Diego Zoo, and he spends it standing in front of the elephants pointing out that they have really, really long trunks. That's the whole video. It's still on YouTube, and as of 2026 it has been watched more than 400 million times.
The site opened to the public in a beta that spring and grew fast. Within a few months it had around 30,000 visitors a day. That fall, a Nike ad showing the Brazilian soccer star Ronaldinho became the first video to reach one million views. In November 2005, the venture capital firm Sequoia Capital invested $3.5 million.
2006
By the summer of 2006, YouTube was one of the fastest-growing sites on the web, serving about 100 million video views a day. It was also a mess of copyright problems, with clips of TV shows and music videos uploaded by fans, and it was spending a fortune on bandwidth to keep up.
The hits of that first stretch were mostly homemade. Judson Laipply dancing through a medley of pop songs in "Evolution of Dance." OK Go's four band members doing a choreographed routine on a row of treadmills. People found them through links friends sent them, and then watched whatever showed up next to them.
Google comes calling
Google had its own video service, Google Video, and it wasn't winning. On October 9, 2006, Google announced it would buy YouTube for $1.65 billion in stock. The deal closed on November 13, 2006, about 18 months after "Me at the zoo."
Plenty of people thought Google had overpaid for a site that lost money and had copyright trouble on every page. Few people say that now.
One small coincidence for domain fans: "Me at the zoo" went up on April 23, 2005. Datacube.com, the 68th .com ever registered, was registered on April 23, 1987. Same day, 18 years apart.