Two decades ago, YouTube wasn’t about the elaborate long-form content pumped out by creators like MrBeast. There wasn’t any fancy lighting, sound effects, or jump cuts.
The platform’s first video, “Me at the Zoo,” was uploaded to YouTube on April 23rd, 2005. It’s a mere 19 seconds long, featuring YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim standing in front of a pair of elephants at the San Diego Zoo.
“Alright, so here we are, in front of the elephants,” Karim says, while glancing back at the elephants. The video offers a brief glimpse of one wrapping hay around its trunk and placing it in its mouth. “The cool thing about these guys is that they have really, really, really long um… trunks, and that’s cool,” Karim says, gesturing. He looks back at the elephants one last time. “And that’s pretty much all there is to say.” (Karim uploaded another video, titled “Rolling down a hill” on April 23rd, but it was deleted.)
The next, “My Snowboarding Skillz,” was uploaded by the user “mw” the very same day. It’s the very first “fail” video uploaded to YouTube, a genre that proliferated on the platform for many years. During the grainy 10-second video clip, you can hear a vague “whooshing” sound get closer as a snowboarder slides up a ramp in a snowy ski area, only to fall just moments later. The snowboarder then picks themself up, and the video cuts off before we can see what happens next.
Just one day later, on April 24th, 2005, a user named “gp” uploaded another video: “tribute.” At just five seconds long, it’s the shortest of the bunch. It shows a person with a brown jacket standing in a nondescript hallway that looks a little like a dormitory. They jump up and balance against the walls before letting out a primal scream. Another person — presumably the one holding the camera — then says, “Very nice” as the person hops down with a thud.
At the time, all three videos were a testament to YouTube’s accessibility: anyone could make a YouTube video by simply capturing a brief moment in time, no matter how mundane it may seem. Though YouTube is now filled to the brim with lengthy tutorials, video deep dives, and vlogs, things have started to come full circle — at least, to some degree.
When Vine launched in 2012, it countered YouTube’s growing library of several-minute-long videos with looping clips that lasted just six seconds. The platform quickly became filled with funny clips and quick skits until it eventually shut down in 2017, making room for TikTok, which merged with the lip-syncing platform Musical.ly, to become a short-form video giant.
As TikTok exploded in popularity, platforms raced to launch short-form video feeds of their own. Instagram launched Reels in 2020, while YouTube brought Shorts to the US in 2021 – despite being the platform where these short videos originated.
The supplementary Shorts look like a far cry from what YouTube videos were like 20 years ago. Most of the clips that YouTube’s algorithm serves up weren’t filmed on a whim, featuring thoughtful scripts and deliberate camerawork that the average person might not know how to recreate. But even with more planning involved, many of them have that glimmer of spontaneity and a sense of connection of the first three videos uploaded to the platform. When you only have so much time, you try to cut to the heart of the matter.
