The first video uploaded to the site was by YouTube’s co-founder Jawed Karim, who was 25 years old at the time: “Me at the zoo” 

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

That was Apr 23, 2005.

I first embedded a YouTube video on one of my sites in January 2006.

In March 2006, I embedded a clip of Peter and Joyce Long who had been interviewed by a TV crew on a kayak outing.

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.

In those days, the race to become the #1 video uploading site was competitive. Vimeo launched earlier, for example.

But these guys won out in the end.

The trio were early employees of PayPal, three of the PayPal Mafia along with Elon Musk, Russel Simmons (Yelp), Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn) and more.

On October 9, 2006, Google announced that it had acquired YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock. It would have been Google or Yahoo. Google was willing to pay more.

FOX was also interested, but Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation had wasted $580m buying Myspace in 2005. They eventually sold MySpace for $35m.

YouTube had $19.8 billion in revenue in 2020. I send YouTube CAD $12 every month for YouTube Premium. Ad free videos. My music subscription. And a few other perks.

One of my most popular videos is from the early days. 😀 Low resolution. No editing. #bad

Click PLAY or watch it on YouTube.