YouTube turns 20: Watch the first video uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim

The 18-second clip has since become iconic, amassing over 35 million views and receiving more than 17 million 'likes'. (Image credit: YouTube)

YouTube turned 20 on Wednesday, and one of the videos circulating on social media along with "happy birthday messages" is the very first clip that was uploaded on the video-sharing platform launched on April 23, 2005.

Titled "Me at the zoo," the video was posted by co-founder Jawed Karim. The 18-second clip has since become iconic, amassing over 35 million views and receiving more than 17 million "likes".

Karim's channel, despite having more than 5 million subscribers, has never featured another video.

Watch it here:

As the title suggests, "Me at the zoo" is a video of Karim standing in front of elephants' enclosure at the San Diego Zoo. "Alright," he begins. "So here we are, in front of the elephants." "The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long, um, trunks. And that's, that's cool." And that's all the 18-second video is all about.

Later, Karim and other co-founders Steve Chen and Chad Hurley sold YouTube to Google for $1.65 billion, and in the nearly two decades that followed, the platform has evolved from a simple video-sharing site into a global media juggernaut.

As a standalone business, YouTube would have been worth between $475 billion and $550 billion, analysts at MoffettNathanson told CNBC. It is the second-most visited website in the world, behind only Google, Similarweb stated. And since its inception, more than 20 billion videos have been uploaded to the site as of April, YouTube said on Wednesday.

“This is the streaming winner,” MoffettNathanson founding partner Michael Nathanson told CNBC. “They don’t have to invest in content. They just hope that the creator community comes to them and builds their business.” He added that YouTube is on track to be the biggest media company by revenue in 2025.